Over at the M/L forum a guy was asking where he could buy a carving mallet, I have a cheap hobby lathe and turn handles and any other nick-knack that comes to mind including carving mallets.
Here are some of my osage file handles;
I like to train my granddaughters to do shop work and had them turn me a couple of mallets out of firewood, they really liked playing on the lathe.
As you can see these have been well used, they are both maple.
All this talk about carving mallets got me thinking about a sweet gum I cut a few weeks ago. I wanted to see if green sweetgum would split while drying as it is impossible to split the trunk when seasoned and pretty tough to split green.
All the wood had been on the ground cut in firewood lengths since I felled the tree.
So here goes, this wood was dripping with moisture and had already started spalting on the ends where it had been cut with a chainsaw.
Even with my el-cheapo lathe tools it literally cut like butter, ribbons of wood came off with my tools like nothing I had ever seen.
So the experiment begins, I will knock out a few more of these and try quick drying in my hot box and drying with a coat of shellac to prevent surface checking.
I was clearing some shooting lanes down in the woods and came across a small 8" walnut sapling trunk that had been on the ground for at least 20 years, the bark and sapwood were long gone from the trunk. When I tried to cut it out of a path the wood was so hard my chainsaw had to struggle to get through it.
I went down in the woods and cut a chunk out of the old walnut sapling on the ground that I mentioned, it dulled my chainsaw cutting it, it was hard.
I sliced it up on my bandsaw to get rid of the outer layer, this stuff was dry, well cured and solid.
I made a quickie carving mallet out of the block, not the neatest job but it will work.
