I’m resurrecting my dads woodcarving tools, which ironically really means repairing the damage I did to them when I was a kid by whacking the wrong things with them, or by trying to figure out how whetstones worked.
He gave up carving when the kids arrived, I think, and he let me have the run of his woodshop, which was pretty generous of him. Now that I have tools & a shop of my own, I can better appreciate how painful that might have been at times.
But my question is about a standard carver’s mallet, like the one below:
It’s got a split in the wood of the head, and I’m trying to figure out if this repairable. Is cyanoacrylate/crazy glue tough enough to do this, if i drizzle some into the crack and then crank it closed in a vice?
use Araldite 24 hour mixed with some of the mallets wood dust. Allow the glue to build up slightly proud of the crack and then re-profile with a file and sandpaper. Should be good for the netx century!
If you are able to drizzle glue into the split and then clamp it truly shut, then carpenters wood glue will work very well. Alternatively, Gorilla Glue (or another urethane glue) will work also well, and it will fill gaps if the split doesn’t close perfectly.
Chair Doctor™ glue does exactly what the name implies; it fixes chairs. If a chair has a loose rung, an injection of Chair Doctor glue will first swell the rung and then bond it in position.
The secret is the low viscosity. It will soak into the end grain of wood, swell the wood and then freeze the wood in the swollen state as it cures. A film of dry glue lines the wood cells, preventing contraction. The glue can penetrate the narrowest of cracks. If you happen to leave any excess or spillage, it can be removed with a damp cloth. Any missed on a surface will dry clear.
Chair Doctor comes in a 2 fl oz bottle with a slim applicator tip that lets you place the glue accurately. Chair Doctor Pro includes 4 fl oz of glue, 1 syringe, and 3 sizes of blunt-tip needles. Usually, you let Chair Doctor glue seep into a loose joint, but for many loose joints you can actually slip our finest needle alongside the tenon to the base of the socket, then inject it full of glue. For very difficult repairs, you can drill a tiny hole (from below or behind) and inject glue into a joint that way. With a syringe, it is very easy to do a large number of joints quickly and neatly. Even better, everything cleans with just water so the needles and syringe are reusable indefinitely.
Which doesn’t really say what it is, chemically speaking. If its water soluable, it can’t be cyan~, but it’s similarly thin.
I would recommend either Epoxy or Polyurethane-based glue. CA Glue is very brittle and less likely to work with drumsticks.
Why even Titebond II would probably be better than CA - but the other glues above and those in the previous post would be even a level higher.
Looks like the chair doctor stuff is just a thin wood glue. If the crack is thin enough to need a real runny product, then that stuff should be fine. But if the crack is wide enough to easily get a thicker glue into, then the thicker glue would probably be a better choice, especially if there’s going to be any gap to fill.
I have several “standard” mallets, some are made of oily tropical woods which sometimes don’t take kindly to aliphatic glues. If you can’t crank it down to it’s original size with a vise you might consider an epoxy with a wood filler.
I’ll second the epoxy and wood dust suggestion. Gorilla glue with sawdust might be a good option too since it dries slightly flexible. It’s viscous though and with sawdust might be tough to get deeply into the crack.
A deep crack in a mallet head like that would be hard to clamp shut and even if you did, the repair would be under a LOT of tension and try to come apart again. Filling it seems a better plan.
Easing/drilling the wedge out & removing the head from the handle is starting to look like the better option, if it works. I can give the shaft a couple of licks with some sandpaper, glue and close the crack in a vice, and then put it back together with a new hardwood wedge.
Another option is to bore a hole through the head across the crack, fill it with a glued hardwood dowel, and then saw the plug off flush. Two narrow dowels on different diagonals will hold the crack closed whatever I happen to whack with it. In fact, I like both ideas. It might be more than I need, but it won’t be too much.
Along the dowel idea, you could put a couple of appropriately sized screws across the crack, countersinking the heads and filling in with dowel. That’s kinda how we fix fractures in the OR…
