How perfect should mallet faces be?
I have worried a lot about the perpendicularity of mallet faces. I have produced my own mallet heads out of both wood and metal on high precision workshop (metal) milling machines. On the heads I produced I milled the faces, after assembly, to be perpendicular to the body. A crude calculation says … length of lawn 33 yds (excluding yard lines), say ball leaves at ½ degree off true … Tan (theta) = opposite / adjacent; adjacent (in inches) = 33yds x 36″; tan (½) =8.73e-3; GIVING A 10.3″ DEVIATION of the centre line of a ball all other things being perfect. I would make the case that the ball is deviated through twice the tilt of the mallet face (think of light beams bouncing off mirrors – although real experiments for large deviations do not show this). This means that a mallet face with a 1/4° degree tilt could lead to a 10″ miss over the length of a lawn. I am amazed anyone ever hits! Consider a laminate face being glued on to the head with a nice gungy layer of glue … the likeli
