Renewing rawhide mallets

[Woodyrock]

A leatherworking tool the collectors seem to value is the heavy rawhide mallet. If a leatherworker wants, or needs one of these you have to settle for one in poor condition.  The renewal of one is actually quite easy once you have it apart. Once apart, and old rings removed (small wooden wedges will help) ,I derust the iron parts, prime them, and repaint. The next step is to make the many rawhide rings, making them slightly larger than the size you want. Assemble the new ring, and leave it to set for a few days, and compress, then retighten. Unless you are lucky, a new handle will be needed as getting the old wedge out will usually ruin the old one.  Here are photographs of ready to reassemble, and finished. After the mallet is reassembled, and compressed size the rawhide by sanding against a disc sander.

Edited February 22, 2017 by Woodyrock

[Woodyrock]

2 hours ago, Woodyrock said:

A leatherworking tool the collectors seem to value is the heavy rawhide mallet. If a leatherworker wants, or needs one of these you have to settle for one in poor condition.  The renewal of one is actually quite easy once you have it apart. Once apart, and old rings removed (small wooden wedges will help) ,I derust the iron parts, prime them, and repaint. The next step is to make the many rawhide rings, making them slightly larger than the size you want. Assemble the new ring, and leave it to set for a few days, and compress, then retighten. Unless you are lucky, a new handle will be needed as getting the old wedge out will usually ruin the old one.  Here are photographs of ready to reassemble, and finished. After the mallet is reassembled, and compressed size the rawhide by sanding against a disc sander. The centre hole in each rawhide disc was bored with hole saw, and the outside cut with tin snips. The rawhide was scrap from making Native American drums so was quite thin. If you use heavy rawhide you will have to saw the outside of each disc.  You can also use industrial plastics like Delrin in place of the rawhide, but will be a wee bit slippery whereas the rawhide has a nice grip when driving a big die.  My largest rawhide mallet weighs 18 pounds, so slipping of the die, and striking my hand would not be a good thing.

 

[catskin]

What is gained by going to all that work as compared to just resurfacing the old one on  the sander  until it gets down to the size of the steel ends?

[Jimmy McLaughlin]

On 2/23/2017 at 0:18 PM, catskin said:

What is gained by going to all that work as compared to just resurfacing the old one on  the sander  until it gets down to the size of the steel ends?

You did a good job, looks great. I felt the same way as Catskin. I soaked some rawhide overnight and wrapped it over the old surface. It is a little heavy, but it works fine. 

Jim