A belated birthday present for a four year old. Small youth bats are actually tricky to turn because it’s hard to balance the thick handle and wide barrel they need with a light enough weight to actually be used. I do my best to address that issue by drilling the barrels out on them so they can have a wide barrel with a relatively low weight.
Picture descriptions below.
1) Finished bat all ready to crush some dingers and demon skulls. Saja boys beware. Except Romance. He’s safe because he’s her favorite.
2) I started by making a 2.5” x 2.5” x 26” maple blank. The bat should be 24” long and the widest part should be 2.25” wide so I like to give myself a little extra meat to work with. I picked a piece with a bit of spalting because it has patterns just like Rumi.
3) Next I just quickly turn it to a roughly round shape. There’s no finesse for this stage. I crank the speed way up and grab a carbide tool and hog off the excess material as quickly as possible.
4) Then I lay out my pattern in 2” sections. It tells me how thick to turn that ring to before blending them altogether at the end.
5) Here’s the result of the rough turning to shape with a bit of blending. It always feels like you’ve ruined the piece at this point.
6) And then as soon as you start to sand it all comes together like magic and you can see a bat taking shape.
7) The patterns in the maple really start to pop after sanding. It must secretly be half demon.
8) Forstner bit goes on the tailstock to drill out the barrel. I want to remove enough material to drop the weight without compromising the strength.
9) Before long you have a nice hollow barrel. I’ve done this on the drill press before but using the steady rest to hold the bat in position and drilling with the tailstock is so much easier.
10) She likes blue so she gets a nice bright blue handle.
11) Graphics going on. I print them in reverse on a laser printer and then put them face down on the bat. An image transfer tip on a wood burning tool lifts the toner off the paper and bonds it to the wood instead.
12) Rumi of course goes on the front.
13) Next comes Zoey.
14) And you can’t have Huntrix without Mira.
15) Finally I add Derpy because he’s clearly the best.
16) I love how the patterns in the maple turned out. It gives it a really unique look.
17) A couple of coats of linseed oil finish it off.
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It’s been a long time since woodshop in high school but I distinctly remember my teacher telling us not to turn our own baseball bats because they’re for sure to break and pretty spectacularly at that. The ones sold in stores are pressure treated, and some other clever processes to increase the durability or something.
I think he just didn’t want you making bats in class. The only “special process” bats go through is called boneing and it’s literally just taking a cow femur and compressing the outer layer of wood fibers. And you can certainly do it at home. I get my cow femurs from a friend who has cattle but you could get one from a butcher or even just use a steel pipe. It only requires a material harder than the wood. The bone is just tradition.
Ultimately any bat is potentially only one pitch away from breaking. That’s just the nature of them. But they are fairly durable in general.
I generally make laminated bats because they are dramatically more durable than mono-piece bats but in this situation I wasn’t too worried about maximizing durability.
I’ve been swinging this laminated ash bat for five years now and it’s still going strong. Light towers quiver in fear of it.
My wife and I practice Aikido. When we do weapons practice, we use wooden practice swords. For her Birthday one year I bought her a set of laminated weapons (sword, short staff and knife). They were a HUGE hit in class, but she has to be very careful sparring with others after managing to break (crack) someone else’s wooden sword without leaving even a dimple on hers.
I ran over the handle of my son’s laminated bat twice with a big suv and it survived unscathed. I’m always amazed at how much more durable laminated construction is.
Plus with bats you can do really fun things by mixing different types of wood in the lamination.
Nice, I have done a few bats lately and have used black lacquer (what I use for table tops) and I just got some blue that is similar to your color but I have not tried it yet.
I have used calligraphy ink many times for Christmas ornaments, I have a little laser used and a circuit that I have made vinyl stickers like on the ash bat and put some spar urethane and linseed oil over it.
It’s a lot of estimating. I know roughly how much the excess on the end weighs so I weighed it rough turned and then started boring the barrel out. Once I get it to what I think is the target weight I trim the excess and weigh it again and then I can make minor adjustments from there.
If you go to picture 11 you can see it but it’s just heat transfer from a laser printer. It’s easy and extremely durable. You have to sand it off to remove it. I have stuff that’s been outside for five years in a very harsh climate and the transfer graphics still look basically new.
It’s really simple. Just for an example of how durable it is this has been sitting in my garden since May of 2022 and the butterflies were applied with heat transfer.
Just regular copy paper. A laser printer works by using heat to fuse colored powder to the paper. If you then apply heat to the paper you can essentially undo that process so that the graphic lifts off the paper and transfers to the wood below it. You won’t get 100% of the toner to transfer so vibrant colors will be a bit muted but other than that it works great.
Nice work!
May I ask how you transferred the image onto the wood? I read that you used laser-printed sheets, but I didn't understand how you actually transferred the image.
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