G’day everyone,
Long time no see! It’s good to see a few familiar faces on the forum, Tom, Teatime and others. It’s certainly been a while since I’ve been back, I logged in and there were 473 pages of unread topics.
For those who don’t know me, I’m Tugga, and I was a serial poster back in 2006-07 on CSF, and back then had an abnormal curiosity about edge sizes and the like.
But yeah, here’s my Fisher Jackal bat, made by Lachlan Fisher down in Melbourne
http://www.fisherbats.com.au/ I actually got this made for me a year and a half back when I went down to visit his workshop. It’s a neat little place, and I only went through the storefront really, but he’s got a line of finished and naked bats laid out there for you to have a swing, including his Australian willow bats. I had fun with that for a while as I was talking to him, and eventually found a bat that he had made for another customer which I quite liked.
I asked him to make a copy of that in hopefully a quite light weight, asking for around 2.7. I suspect he does weigh them naked though, as when I actually got it from him a couple of weeks later it weighed around 2.10 finished including extratec, grip and stickers.
The shape itself is quite basic, he tends to make a quite traditional shape, having seen quite a few other players use them, he’s quite popular in Melbourne. He doesn’t really do bows or concaving, which I’m not fussed with, I like a fairly solid shape, though I do prefer the pick up on concaved bats. It doesn’t pick up the lightest thing in the world, but I can still play all the shots in the book normally with it. Not a featherlight, but you can feel it in your hands if you know what I mean.
Based on my grip, he wondered whether I wanted a shortened handle which I hadn’t really thought about, so I thought I’d give it a try. So he chopped the knob of the end, and surprisingly it felt pretty good. I do have a tendency to choke the handle a bit, so I did feel like there was some extra freedom around my wrists, especially when I was going for my cross bat shots. The handle itself also is a very very distinct oval shape, which I love; I never really got on with round handles, like the handles that we get on the Gray Nics bats over here. It's quite thick too so it's got a really nice feel. I’ve slapped on a second grip too, I like the extra thickness and cushion it provides.
Appearance wise it’s not fantastic, six grains only, but it is his bottom of the range model. It does make a really good noise when you connect though, gives that real good crunch noise. Testing it with a couple of my old bats and teammates it does make a slightly lower pitched noise, perhaps it’s a little bit softer. Couple of knots here and there but it’s a fairly clean face. I don't go through bats really so I like them to last, so a tad fewer grains is alright with me. Having previously never had extratec, I've found it is quite handy, obviously none of those little surface cracks and whatnot.
Middle position is fairly standard, but there’s quite a bit of wood everywhere so it’s very solid in terms of ping. Middle is quite large, in terms of shape you could perhaps compare it to a GM Flare, a rounded non-concaved spine with decent edges and spine height. Edges are roughly 27mm but it’s a little hard to measure on this, he does like to make bats with quite a rounded face, so it kind of blurs it off. Spine height I haven’t measured properly but I’d hazard a guess at 55mm? Or thereabouts.
Here’s a really interesting webpage on Fisher:
www.vwa.org.au/files/1913/4805/6066/VWA-Newsletter-1209-Sep-2012.pdf where he does a superficial review of the batmaking process and there’s a few decent pics of his workshop.
This one was pretty cool too:
http://cityjournal.dsc.rmit.edu.au/2011/09/30/batting-up-some-winners/ where he talks about making Ponting’s bats for a brief period in the late 90’s.
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Topic: It's been a while. Here's my review of my Fisher cricket bat! (Read 11388 times)