I marked out three sections of the milled lumber in the shape of the mallet head and cut them out. Except that I didn’t do the top bevel; I figure that I can do it after I glued the thing up.

I picked out a piece for the center and marked out the part where the handle will go through. After paring to the knife edge, I sawed partway down the sides. Finally, I knocked out a little bit off the top area between the saw kerfs so that it ended up looking like this:

The reason for removing that piece was that my plan was to glue that face to another piece like this:

The theory is that when the glue is dry, I’ll be able to saw from the other side, remove the center (where the handle will eventually go), clean it up, then glue on the last piece. The center will now comprise of two parts, perfectly in-line. Well, I hope I used enough glue.