Making a maul - question?

[GRod]

Absolutely fantastic!  I'm not sure where on the globe you are, and like Fred, I also know them as 'acorn nuts'.  One of the big-box home centers near me (Menards - it's like Home Depot/Lowes, but a midwest regional chain) carries a selection of chrome plated acorn nuts that would finish that off nicely.  

If that maul works half as well as it looks, you're going to appreciate it for a lifetime.  Nice, nice, nice work.

[dikman]

Thanks for the kind words, guys. I'm downunder (Australia), we have a large hardware chain here that lists dome nuts, but they only say they're 10mm and don't give the pitch size! I'll have to buy a pack and hope they're the right pitch, otherwise I'm back to making something.

I've been chopping up milk cartons into little pieces ready for the next one. Might make this a bigger diameter but tapered like heydox's, and probably turn a wooden handle rather than leather (a stacked leather handle is a lot of work!!).

Another one I might try is a rawhide one, a chap on youtube made a mallet using those big rawhide dog bones to get the rawhide. Sounds like another challenge.

[dikman]

Ok, fitted a chrome dome nut and now it's finished. I started on the second one, using the turnings from the first one. When I started turning it, however, I started finding fissures where the plastic hadn't fused together during the melting process. Fortunately the solution was fairly simple, I used a Dremel pin-point gas torch to carefully melt the fissures and feed in small pieces of cut plastic, using a screwdriver to move the molten blobs around. A word of warning, this stuff catches fire if it gets too hot!! This one will end up smaller than I intended but I'll turn a taper on it and make a wooden handle.

[dikman]

No 2. The brass at the front gives it quite a bit of weight. I had experimented with melting brass a couple of years ago, it melted fine but my casting was borderline disaster, I ended up with a thick disc and a lovely run across the ground! I figured this disc would do for the front but turning it down revealed a lot of small air bubble inclusions (you might see a few on the front). I also found a big one inside when I drilled and tapped it for the rod. Oh well, still good enough for this job. Like the other I Loctited it to the rod. The first handle was a piece of aged Blackwood, unfortunately a chunk split off partway through turning. This one is a piece of aged Apple tree, interesting stuff as it's actually reasonably hard wood. I applied three coats of my home-made Walnut stain, which came out better than I expected, and finished off with beeswax applied while it was spinning in the lathe. Not very shiny but quite grippy.

Now I need to make a much bigger one but I need to give more thought to the melting process.

 

[GRod]

Aaaaand, another beauty!

You casting your own brass weight from reclaimed pistol cartridges, yes?  That's a really great idea!  Did you do the same (with a different metal, obviously ) for the first maul as well?

[dikman]

That was cast from scrap brass that I've collected, although I have a fair amount of used brass cartridges that I'm thinking about melting down. The first one is steel, and although I can forge the stuff I can't melt and cast it.

[JazzBass]

Excellent!

You sure COULD go into business with these, if your were so inclined - but I respect your decision to only make your own.

Beautiful work!

[OwenSweenie]

Indeed, it looks fantastic! Great job!

[dikman]

For anyone else wanting to try melting plastic to make anything, my latest "test" results. I tried making another maul head and used the fine turnings from my previous one. Now, this "should" have melted easier and fused better according to my reasoning. Unfortunately it tended to be somewhat spongy and took a lot of pressure to squeeze it together, so while it worked I'm not overly happy with the result (plus the plastic appeared to scorch so looks brown). The best results came from using the milk bottles cut up into approx. 3/4" squares.

I tried another smaller one, in half a tin, but rather than use the oven I placed a few pieces in the bottom of the tin and used an electric heat gun to heat the plastic until it was transparent, then added more pieces, heated again and so on until the tin was full. Every few layers I used a piece of wood to ram the molten mass down. I then clamped the resultant mass to squeeze it together and left to cool. This was quicker than using the oven and the lump at the end looked pretty good with a fairly uniform white colour and minimal flaws.

Like many things, the process looks easy.........until you try it!

[GRod]

9 hours ago, dikman said:

I tried making another maul head and used the fine turnings from my previous one. Now, this "should" have melted easier and fused better according to my reasoning.

I would have assumed exactly the same thing.  I'm surprised it didn't work out that way.

 

9 hours ago, dikman said:

This was quicker than using the oven and the lump at the end looked pretty good with a fairly uniform white colour and minimal flaws.

This also surprises me.

Thanks for sharing these notes.  I am fascinated by the idea of melting and molding (moulding? ) waste plastic into useful stuff.  Since I don't have ready access to a lathe I am looking out for a suitable drinking vessel or tumbler like @heydox used for his mold.  I figure if I can get close I can fine-tune it on my drill press.

I also found a US plastics dealer, a small shop by the looks of things, who deals in all kinds of shapes & sizes of all kinds plastics.  He offers 'rods' made of Delrin (acetal?) and HDPE particularly, which are 12" (30ish cm?) by 2.5" - 3" (6 - 8 cm).  I'm guessing that Delrin is a name-brand formulation of something more generically known as acetal.  Something like that would be a nice jump start to a maul, but it does reduce the cost-effectiveness of a DIY solution.  Besides, a 3" diameter piece of Delrin is really expensive... at least in this format.  Regular old acetal and HDPE are pretty affordable, and I would bet one could create three or four mauls from a single 12" stick of the stuff.

But I really want to melt down my own scrap.  Because... well...  fire & metal and all that.