There has been a fair bit of talk on this forum about Southerners being unwilling to travel.
I myself am guilty of getting a nosebleed if I have to travel any further north than Winchester! Despite the fact we aren't willing to travel,
@simonmay5 & I made a trip "up North" to Peterborough on Thursday, for a visit to Hunts County, arranged through the forum's very own
@Vitas Cricket.
We both set our alarms for 5am, with the aim of meeting at Chertsey at 8.30ish and only taking one car up the country. Why Chertsey you may ask, we had planned to meet
@FattusCattus who was going to accompany us, but work sadly prevented him from joining us
As we had plenty of time to get to Hunts (our "appointment" was 11am) we found a service station for a much needed bacon sandwich and coffee stop!
With some helpful directions from Jake (and a warning not to miss our turn as we'd end up 2 miles away from where we needed to be) we arrived at Hunts about an hour early.
The first task we had was to select our cleft, there were a fair few for us to go through
Simon's task was much easier, as he was after a short blade, long handle. Tony was aware of this so has a few clefts cut to size ready, then he disappeared upstairs and emerged with a few more. Simon chose his cleft and Tony started working his magic.
Meanwhile my "maybe pile" was growing bigger the more willow I looked at.
With Simon's bat shaped, it was my turn to hand the cleft over to Tony. Watching him work was a real treat, he has over 50 years of podshaving experience and it shows. He was a magician with the drawknife, and he made it look effortless to make a beautiful bat.
One for the health & safety man - Tony using his body to hold the bat against the wall while he worked
Once the bats were shaped (which was a surprisingly quick process) Tony took us for a quick tour of the factory. He showed up some of the clefts that were yet to be handled (more on that later), the two presses Hunts have, and he even fired up the copy lathe to show us how a cleft gets made into a part shaped clefts like those we got to pick from. (Some muppet forgot to take any pictures of this...)
This is the older of the two presses, used mainly for repairs now.
After our tour it was time for the bats to be sanded. The sanders are inflatable, with the smaller drum on the right used for the shoulders and the larger one for the blade.
After the shining and polishing, the handle was bound (again no pictures) and we had the task of choosing our stickers. I will let Simon do the honours of revealing what he had made, while I will post a review of the bat in it's own thread.
Overall I loved every minute of my time in the Hunts factory. Everyone was great to talk to and you could tell they loved what they did.
Some reviews of these visits have said Tony can be a bit frosty. We didn't find this at all. He was incredibly friendly and spent the whole time chatting to us. It was worth the trip for his stories alone!
Earlier in the review I mentioned that Tony showed us some raw clefts. He had a few butterflys in, and I may have asked for one of them to be made into a bat for me...
Author
Topic: Two Southerners have a grand day out (Read 5158 times)