Hello

I'm trying to make a wooden carpenter's mallet, and I'm
looking for a few tips on how to cut a tapered dado in each half of
the mallet head pieces, and have the matching tapered handle fit
properly in the tapered through mortise which I will have after gluing
the two head pieces together. I'm using osage orange for the mallet
head, so any errors could be expensive.
I have tried making a prototype from some maple offcuts using
a crosscut sled and wedge's, but the results were not so good. Now
I'm leaning towards using a top bearing straight cut routerbit, and a
template.
My brain is a bit sluggish on this one so any suggestions would
be greatly appreciated.

Ken

PS A google search didn't yield much in the way of technique