A couple months ago, I made a hand-carved meat tenderizing mallet. Click-through for some stages of the process.

First we start with a block of wood.

Then we plane it.

Some nice Quarter-Sawn white oak grain.

Tried and true.

Oh hey, it’s starting to look like a mallet.

Now to carve that pesky grid in to one side.

Done! That was easy!

LOL. No. I screwed up a good number of times. So I just sawed off the mistake and did it again. Practice makes perfect.

Even more mallet like!

Now we need a place to put the handle. The handle in this just slides in. It’s a tapered friction fit, so the mallet can be taken apart for storage, but is quite strong in use.

Mortise done. Took about 2 hours to get this perfect. Tall tapered mortises are difficult. The edges are chamfered inwards to avoid tearout when the mallet is assembled and disassembled.