Thunder Matt's Bat Odyssey (Part III)

Wow. A lot of discussions and musings about maple baseball bats lately. They're exploding into shards everywhere, people are getting impaled, Reed Johnson is getting frustrated, and I remembered that I'm supposed to be making a bat. An ASH bat, nonetheless. Quickly my attention went back to the project. If Slumpbuster can make a big enough debut, maybe I could quit my day job and make bats for Reed Johnson! We'll see.

I set up the white ash bat blank (or billet) on the lathe and went to turning it down, meaning I started roughly shaping the bat. I'll have to say that I was quite nervous working with the actual wood that is to become Slumpbuster. I actually went through the trouble of sharpening all of the gouges and skews that would be used in the manufacturing, and what a difference it made. The pictures do show it to an extent, but the amount and velocity of the shavings are somewhat lost in two dimension, still-action photos. It was actually quite fun seeing all the shavings fly everywhere and get caught in all of the spiderwebs that I never knew my garage had. It was like being a kid again, save for the fact that carelessness could leave to a loss of fingers and or hands and eyes.

I decided to start with the barrel, more so just because it has less wood to take off. Starting there, I would have a point to work from while making my way down the handle. Again, not sure of this is the proper way to do it, I'm just thinking that it's easier to taper down than taper up. Surprisingly, after only 15 or 20 minutes, things started taking shape. The barrel was done in about 10 minutes and after I began tapering, the thing actually started looking like a bat.

Working on the handle has proven to be the most nerve-wracking and intricate part of the odyssey. The knob on the end of the bat has a pretty tight inside curve, which loves to "grab" your gouge and try to fling it in the air. As you can imagine, this is not fun. To make matters worse, the knob was also the section that I had the blowout on while fabricating the prototype. I love all of you guys that read this site (that's a lot of love spread around 14 ways), but not enough to keep buying blanks of "bat quality" white ash if I screw it up.

After some light sanding and fine tuning after fine tuning on the handle and taper, I think she's just about done. As the picture shows, I'm still a bit chickenshit on finishing the handle. I'm putting that on hold until I can consult a local Quad City woodturner on the best way to attack it. This old-timer has been a great resource so far on this project, and I'm gonna milk him for all his worth. That sounded gross.

I took Slupbuster off the lathe and gave her a maiden swing. Words can't describe the feeling it gave me, but "heavy" and "sore back" kind of come to mind. Maybe I'll have to thin it down a bit more. That will have to wait, the local minor league team is playing tonight, and the opposing coach is none other than Ryne Sandberg. I may have to scout some players and see who'd be interested and worthy of swinging a Slumpbuster during their rise to stardom. Until next time, kids, be sure and wear eye protection...

The Prototype, The Model, Slumpbuster

Thunder Matt's Bat Odyssey (Part II)

Well, after talking about it, I finally got around to starting the Thunder Matt Bat. First off was making a prototype. Originally I had some regular 2x4 lumber glued up, but after roughly shaping it, I was growing tired of half of it chipping off and hitting me in the face. If you're scoring at home, that's not good. As luck would have it, I found a solid piece of fir (very soft wood) that would hopefully do better, and it did.

I started out trying to shape the bat by memory, but I quickly found that since Little League, years of Mt. Dew, Old Style and roll-your-own cigarettes had left my memory about as sharp as a Jamie Moyer fastball. A quick trip to the parents house produced a wooden bat from the Field of Dreams and got me back on track. Working away in my garage for the first time this year was nice. The weather is better, I could open the windows, but everyone and their grandma seemed to wander in and see what was going on. "That doesn't look like bat!" was the most common remark. "You have a misshaped head" was my common retort.

When I finally was left alone, I set to work on the bat. Never having done this before, I didn't know if you were supposed to start at the barrel or the handle. Because there was more wood to take, I started by roughing out the handle end of the bat. Nothing too terribly exciting to report, you don't have to be super careful when making the initial shape, mostly working with a gouge tool. The initial shaping went pretty well. I'm not an overly accomplished wood turner, but still it only took me about 30 minutes to get to a rough bat shape.

When I started working on the handle end to do some finer, finishing cuts with a 1" skew tool, disaster struck. Because fir is a soft wood with an almost flaky grain (and most certainly because I did something wrong), the bat blew out on the end. Needless to say, it was a little frustrating after putting in all the work. I guess that's why you do a prototype first, right? I'm banking on learning from my mistakes on this one, so it won't happen when I get around to turning the final ash stock. In a sense, I was lucky the chip wasn't more severe. I was still able to turn the rest of the bat save for the bottom six or seven inches. Practice, practice, practice.

After getting it pretty darn close to resembling a bat, I decided to call it good. I found that I really need to get a set of calipers and use the Field of Dreams bat for a template, customizing certain features here and there. For example, I like a bigger knob on the end of the bat and I like the bat to have a little bit thicker handle. Like Soriano's bat, I guess. It will probably yield similar batting average results as well. I may also try to hollow out the end to give it some more balance. We'll have to see. For your viewing pleasure, I added some lemon oil to give the bat some color, and you can see it sort of looks like a bat.

That's all for now. Don't forget to vote for name to be engraved on the bat in the right hand column.

Thunder Matt's Bat Odyssey

Like my grandfather and my father before me, I am a woodworker. Hmm, I guess that doesn't sound quite as profound as I had intended. Doesn't really reach out and grab you like professional athlete, adult film star, or Italian does. Nonetheless, some wisdom has been passed down, along with some limited skills, and most importantly, an ultimate set of tools. Now that baseball season is in full swing, what better project to take to task than making a baseball bat?

I have to admit, I'm surprised myself that I've never made a bat before. You'd think being a baseball nut that possesses some passion for woodworking would have spawned this project years ago. For whatever reason it hasn't, and the Bat Project has taken a backseat to book cases, shelves, tool boxes, birdhouses, checker boards, and other various fare that falls under the Knick Knack category or other assorted craft goods.

Luckily, I own a wood lathe, the essential tool in making a bat. I'm sure you've all seen The Natural, right? Lightning strikes a branch down from an ash tree on Roy Hobb's farm and he takes the wood and turns it into Wonder Boy. Yeah, well that's the same tool that Roy Hobb's used. The lathe spins the wood, and you use various gouges, skews, and shears to shape the wood. So very exciting! When this bat is finally finished, I too, hope to hit a monster home run that turns the outfield lights into a 4th of July fireworks celebration.

The first step is to choose the type of wood to use. The most common varieties are hickory (heavy and dense), white ash (light and strong), and most recently maple, which was introduced to the MLB in large scale when Barry Bonds starting making noise with his Sam Bat. Other species used are birch and in exotic cases, bamboo (comes from China, automatically disqualified after reading Brant's rant on them). For accessibilty, performance, and above all, price, I've selected white ash, which cost me $23 at a local saw mill.

The bat will be made according to Major League specifications, with a 2-5/8" barrel and a 32" length. A shorty to be sure, but that's the longest bat I can turn on my lathe, so that's what it will have to be. Since I've never turned a bat, I'm going to do a trial run on some glued up 2x4's, trying to perfect the taper, fit and feel before working on the ash. Like Roy Hobbs before me, I'll solder a name into it, leaving it up to you, the readers, to decide. Just look over to the right in the column and cast your vote by May 1st. I'll post pictures during each phase, and possibly some video of the "test run", where I'm going to take some BP with it and pray to God that it doesn't shatter.