Dual Purpose Mallet

The brief here was simple: Design and make a mallet. The making is easy enough and could have been made in a few minutes, but design for the sake of design is not design at all, it is making. Making does have a purpose, but it comes after the design process. Stripping away the extra information around a mallet I found that mallet-ness comes down to shape and hardness (energy transfer). Comfort, esthetics and care/storage were also considerations. For my studio and what I needed, a round mallet was best. The hardness was a different matter. I needed a hard and a medium soft mallet for two types of carving. Using grain orientation as my tool I made one side of the mallet harder and the other softer. Soft being a relative term, it is still oak, but the grain has more give on the soft side. The handle is shaped based on a mold of my grip and the flat top allows for storage on any flat surface in the studio. In the photo the line between sides is in the middle. This mallet is now my go to in my studio. Materials: Oregon White Oak, PVA glue.