Mallet Head Angle
timberframe-tools.com60 points by frogulis 2 days ago
60 points by frogulis 2 days ago
The argument for head angle sounds good, but in practice it doesn't matter. An awful darn lot of houses were framed with hammers that have the head perpendicular to the handle. If it were essential, they'd have started making hammers with angled heads sometime in the last 3,000 years.
Source: am a furniture maker, professionally. I've switched from using a joiner's mallet to a lump hammer, so I have experience with both. The lump hammer faces are perpendicular to the handle, not angled in the slightest. Better lump hammers have slightly domed faces, so if you're walloping a piece together and don't have time to grab a block to protect it (time moves faster once the glue is on), you're less likely to leave a bruise from the edge of the face if you don't hit it with the face of the hammer/mallet dead square to the wood. Joiner's mallets generally have flat faces because it's easier to build them that way.
In practice, you also aren't usually swinging in an arc when you hit a nail or chisel either. You start your swing in an arc, and transition to a flatter trajectory as you approach the end of the swing so you have less motion in the plane of the face of the head as you're hitting the nail/chisel. Or in other words, you want the head traveling along the axis you're trying to drive the nail/chisel so you don't skew it off axis.
I was slightly annoyed by the whole rigmarole about the angle as well. Silly of course because everybody should use the angle that suits them best. It's just that when I was taught 'hammering' as a kid, it was drilled into my head that I should always have the pivot point of the arc level with the thing I was hammering. So if you hammer from your wrist your wrist should be level with the impact point, and if swinging from the elbow the elbow should be there.
I couldn't stand angled mallets, because if you want to strike something on a flat surface you'll have to put your wrist awkwardly close to the surface.
Also, in the webpage he holds the mallet more than halfway up the handle, wasting the bottom half. I was similarly drilled to always hold it at the end of the handle to maximize the length.
And then I'm slightly annoyed because he confuses flaired and flared.
All in all a very nice website, where I can be comfortably annoyed by nice niche nerdy topics. A blast from the past in between the onslaught of AI related content ;-P
Some mallets have extra long handles where you are supposed to hold them higher up, the part of the handle below your hand is there for balance. This is rare, and generally there isn't enough of a difference as to be worth it.
In practice, like many things, it's a matter of preference. I'm firmly a novice, but find I prefer an angle while chiseling but can't tolerate it for any other use of a hammer.
Do you use your lump hammer (aka mini-sledge as I know them) for chiseling much? I know masons like them but they use steel chisels, I've been taught to avoid using metal hammers on wood chisels.
As with everything in woodworking and Perl, theres more than one way to do it :-) If it works for you, that's what matters.
I do use my lump hammer when chiseling. Not hitting wooden tools with a metal hammer/mallet is one of those things people get all worked up about, but it's not really a big deal. For my money, it delivers a firmer strike than a beech mallet.
I have destroyed a chisel handle that was well on its way out when I got it used at a flea market, but turning a chisel handle is within my modest turning abilities.
I've always gotten so little done in wood working because I love making tools more than furniture. This was great. It's a good example of how unintuitive but important knowledge is everywhere in tool-use and design, too. I'd never seen this approach to creating mallet head angles, and when I've done it in the past, I literally eyeballed it. Whoops. Maybe that's why I don't use the mallet so often.
There is nothing wrong with loving to make tools - you are honest about it. If your love is making furniture though then making tools isn't feeding your love.
Aside: your username is the name of one of my favourite North American fish.
I do love to make furniture, but really, any time spent tinkering, learning, and crafting is feeding the love. The more important question is if it feeds my wife's love for furniture/home projects, haha. (No, it often doesn't)
What shall I make with all my tools? I shall make another tool!
Familiar impulse among software engineers.
Any crafts project. Craft discussions often devolve into what is the best shed or how to arrange your workspace.
I have finally set a personal rule: at least 50% of my time must be spend working on the projects I'm interested in, and not the workspace. If I make/buy a tool for a specific project that is okay, but only if I use it on the project - until it is used for that project it counts against the general budget.
"More printer's printers print prints for printer's printers than printer's printers print prints for printer's projects."
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Zach Freedman's quote lamenting the same thing in the 3D printing world.
My favorite part of these woodworking diaries is when they inevitably make a minor mistake like hammer in the wedge too early, or fasten/glue something upside-down. It's a delightful little window into their thought process, and the sort of complacency we see in other crafting disciplines.
This seems to assume that the segment between the pivot point (wrist or elbow) and the butt of the chisel must form a 90° angle with the chisel's shaft. Not being a woodworker – can't one simply move the wrist or elbow slightly higher (thus forming an obtuse angle) to compensate for the depth of the head to ensure that even with a flat mallet head strikes perpendicularly? So mallet head angle becomes purely an ergonomic adjustment to allow better arm placement.
You should - I suspect his workbench was too high for his work. If you are doing precision work you want your workbench high and close to your eyes - but you would not be using a mallet at all for this work, since your fingers give more than enough power. By contrast for have work you want things very low so you can get your whole body into the mallet swing.
Most people don't have enough workbenches (of even space to put them) to have one for the correct height for everything, but it does seem he is making the wrong compensation for ergonomics.
I like marking the date with the stamp of a penny. I knew a builder who did similar on a home and used pennies as washers in a few places— date visible of course. Otherwise good write up and never used a hammer or mallet with angled face
I’m impressed a 2010 web page is still up. The links at the end are pretty much all dead. I have actually wondered what the angle should be when I turn a mallet—now I know.
They wrote about restoring a Ithaca model 37 last year. The post is also really good:
http://www.timberframe-tools.com/firearms/1975-ithaca-model-...
I've been surprised that no mallet manufacturer offers the purchaser the option of specifying the forearm length/desired angle for mallet heads.
Lovely writeup. Makes me want to go make something with my hands!
Thought the headline was some oblique metaphor, but it is quite literal woodworking advice.