HDPE Mallet - AKA Milk Jug Hammer

[nonhog]

Very interesting.
Curious about the melting process, how many layers of melted chips to make your hammer face?
Are they all in the oven at the same time? How do you go from oven to form? Do they pour off heating pan or do you scoop them?
In my head I see it coming apart if the process is off?

Cool stuff-want to try this, how smelly does the kitchen get, could be a deal breaker for me.

[mr95gst]

Some people use toaster ovens, but since I had so much to melt, I used the kitchen oven. There is no smell. The first time I did it, I put the chips in the wood form while in the oven. The wood gave off some fumes. My wife wasn't happy. The next time I didn't put the wood in and you could barely tell anything was in the oven. If you look at the picture I have of the chips in the oven, I probably used 6 to 7 times that much for the hammer. When you mound cold chips in a pan they take up a lot of space. Once they heat up the mound will collapse since all the curved pieces are flattening out. At this point it is about the consistency of chewing gum. It does not melt into a puddle and they don't really melt together. You have to ball it all up together in the pan. The HDPE will stick to a bare pan but only tacky against wax paper. Once the chips get hot a sticky, I used the wax paper to fold them over on themselves a couple times. That allowed more room on the pan to add more chips. Once I got a decent amount, I folded it to as close to the size of the form as I could and peeled it into the mold (still like a big wad of chewing gum). The first night I started I melted a ton of chips and only filled the mold 1/3 after clamping. The next time, I melted chips in one pan and reheated my previously molded block on another pan (you can kind of see that in the picture). When the new chips and block were hot, I tossed it all in the mold together. It took several hours to cool. The HDPE shrank so it just fell out of the mold.