HDPE Carving Mallet

I've wanted to make my own carving mallet out of recycled HDPE plastic since I saw this Luxury Wood Carvers Mallet. The basic concept is the same: chop up and melt HDPE plastic into a form and turn it into the final shape on a lathe. I went for a hardwood handle instead of the leather.

I really like the vibrant colours of the recycled plastic and think it looks great. I'm looking forward to my next carving project!

1. HDPE plastic bottles
2. Scisors
3. Hardwood
4. Paper shredder
5. Small oven
6. Tin cans
7. Lathe
8. Tin snips
9. Brass Tube
10. 5 Minute Epoxy Glue
11. File
12. Sandpaper
13. Drill
14. Bees Wax
15. Cotton Rag
16. Chisel

The first step is to collect a large number of old HDPE plastic bottles. I used a lot of milk bottles and ice cream containers. Using some scissors, I chopped the bottles up into strips and then used an old paper shredder to further chop up the pieces. In hindsight, the shredder didn't work as well as I wanted, as I still needed to chop the pieces up by hand.

I used an old mini oven to melt the plastic and then compress it into a tin can in the vice. This worked reasonably well, but the temperature control on this was pretty inaccurate. I believe a full-size oven with better temperature control would make this easier to get to the correct temperature. I opted not to do this in the kitchen as I didn't want the house smelling of melted plastic.

I did this in my workshop with plenty of ventilation and recommend you do the same.

Once the plastic has cooled, it will solidify and can be removed from the tin cans. Sometimes the plastic is easy to get out of the tin can, but other times I had to cut the can away using tin snips.

Please note that it can take quite a while to actually cool off, so be patient.

I used my metal lathe to turn the mallet head. This can also be done on a normal wood lathe, but I wanted to see how well the lathe tooling worked on HDPE plastic. It's actually a really fun material to machine.

I drilled a 25mm diameter hole about 3/4 of the way through for the handle.

I had a nice piece of hardwood that was the perfect size. I just needed to make it a little smaller and then sand and polish the handle. I made the handle so it was a tight fit into the mallet head hole, as it will be a friction fit. You need to get the fit right, as any glue I've tried won't stick to HDPE plastic.

After applying a beeswax finish, I then ran the lathe at full speed to melt this into the wood with a cotton rag. Do not apply any wax to the part of the handle that goes into the mallet head to increase the friction.

If you've made the parts tight enough, you will find you can't seat the handle all the way into the head, as it will compress the air inside. You need to provide a relief hole for the air to escape. I just used a carving chisel to make a small slot on one side of the handle. Another option would be to drill a small hole through the top of the mallet head, but I find the slot is the most hidden design.

After removing the wood from the lathe, there was a final part that needed a quick sand and polish. I find rubbing the wood onto the waxed rag from earlier applies enough heat and pressure to coat the end.

The handle can now be pressed into the head partway by hand. Once you get it started, you can use a wooden mallet to drive the handle in the rest of the way. Do this by holding the mallet by the handle and striking the end of the handle with a mallet. The momentum will drive the handle into the head.

I like to hang most of my tools up, but I find that just drilling a hole in the handle doesn't look very good. Instead, I normally drill a 6mm hole and use some 5-minute epoxy to glue a small piece of brass tube into the hole.

Once the epoxy dries, I carefully file the brass flush with the handle.