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Some Light Machining I have a little lathe. I love it. For this job a good wood lathe would do as long as you can slow down the speed enough and have a 3 jaw chuck to center round stock with. My wood lathe is a mangy dog of a lathe which is barely passable for woodwork, forget metal work on it. So, I divvied up the disks I'd cut into three piles, for the three mallets and measured, then cut, the threaded rod. The only reason I needed the lathe at all, besides final turning of the plastic to shape, was to center drill one end of the big rod to be threaded to take the small rod for the handle and start the tap square too. Drilling anything on end and perfectly centered and square to the host metal requires a lathe. On a lathe the hole -wants- to drill in the center and up the axis. Any other way, anything at all, and you are fighting it every minute.
It's completely possible to start a hand tap by eye and have your threads along the axis you want, but it's safer to use a fixture and no worry you'll get them cattywhompus, or wonky (for my British influenced pals). Here is my lathe, and the place in the shop where it lives (under canvas most of the time) just for a gloat.
It's not so impressive a lathe, being merely a flat bed Atlas, but the spare parts and accessories I got with it weigh much more than the lathe itself and in metal work the spare tooling and parts are always harder to find than the parent lathe. This one came equipped with pretty much everything made for it. The heavy all-thread being end drilled and tapped, it was time to assemble the parts and turn to shape. I turned the plastic in the lathe. When it was suitably true I wanted to paint the hardware a uniform black and taped off the poly. Gave it a good shot and dried well. It's not the sturdiest paint, ordinary Rustoleum. But it will hold up pretty decent and look well loved when it does start to go. Besides not that much of it shows anyway.
Here it is after the tape came off.
I chose rosewood for the handles. Any hard tough beautiful wood will do, but there's something about genuine rosewood that says fine tool to me, every time. I turned them on my regular wood lathe between centers, leaving a short cylinder of scrap on the end. Unless you are better than me, you always have a bit of scrap left on the ends of a spindle turning anyway. Before cutting this off !! I transferred to the metal lathe and bored a hole for the handle rod all the way through. You can do this on a wood lathe too if you figure a way to center and hold the "plug" you are leaving on one end of the handle. A simple scrap mounted to a faceplate and bored for the plug will do it. They make end drilling bits just for this job but they don't exactly give them away I tell you. I have to turn my face and squint at the catalog out the side of my eyes to even be able to see the prices they usually ask! Yikes, I'm never going to have any. In the metal lathe, an ordinary long bit, approached from each end to the middle, gets you close enough to perfect center boring.
I like my mallets to be able to stand on their end so they don't roll away on you and I also like to be able to hang them up, so I added a ring. I put screw eyes in over top of my favorite window so they always hang in ever-so-plain sight. Nothing worse than searching for your mallet.
yours, Scott
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