Scraps project

[Cherryville Chuck]

It used to be said on the old forum that there was no such thing as scraps, just wood that hadn't found it's final purpose. Here is a project for some of mine. I've been meaning to turn a carver's mallet for a while and finally got to it. Handle/core is Siberian elm that was too knotty for anything else. Light colored wood with the speckles is Hawthorne. There aren't a lot of them around and they aren't big and not very straight but the wood is beautiful and 2 to 2 1/2 times harder than white birch. White birch is the white wood at the corners of the glue up. The orange-ish narrow strips are cherry. The purpleheart is pretty obvious.

I've seen other turning projects where a lot of strips of different colored woods were glued up and then made into bowls or vases, etc. It's a bit time consuming and uses a fair bit of glue but the results are often worth it and it's a way to use up small pieces.

[Stick486]

need we tell you not to use that mallet for anything other than show????

[Cherryville Chuck]

I showed it to Myra last night and she said "you're playing around doing that when you could have been working on something I want?" I thought she was going to be the first to use it.

[Herb Stoops]

Sounds like when I was a kid and my dad would assign me a chore to do and in so doing, I would find a fun thing to do instead. LMAO
Herb

[DaninVan]

"I thought she was going to be the first to use it."
Be careful what you wish for, Charles...

[DesertRatTom]

That's real purdy Charles. Nice way to use those leftover bits.

[Nickp]

Nicely done, Charles...especially the angle cuts...

[Cherryville Chuck]

They just look angled Nick. The design was more a series of necessities rather than a predetermined plan. I started out with the handle piece and since it had some knots and splits I though I had better see if I was going to be able to turn it without it blowing up on me so I roughed out the handle shape and that went well enough to figure I was okay to add pieces for the mallet part. First I wanted to add the hawthorne because it's extra hard but the piece I had wasn't quite as wide as the handle section and since it was partially turned I didn't want to cut it down more to match the hawthorne so that necessitated adding the strips of cherry to flush out to the edges. Then what was left of the hawthorne wasn't long enough at the width I needed so I went with pieces of the purpleheart on the other two sides. It's also pretty hard and dense so should be able to take some pounding. That just left filling in the corners so I used a chunk of birch for that because it's whiteness went well with the other colors. Like so many of my projects are turning out to be, I start with a decent mental plan of what I want and then keep making adjustments when reality and materials don't match the plan.