This thread has wandered a fair bit away from the title, but I think it serves as a place for all the bats I've made. So hopefully it's ok to post another one in here.
This is the second-to-last design I want to test myself with: a shorter T20 blade. Full confession - it was inspired by the Blank Bats B20, even if the profile ended up quite different. The plan was to make the blade shorter, and also drop the shoulders to make a longer handle. So overall not too much shorter than usual.
It started with a grade 2 part-made from Hell 4 Leather again. One of the main reasons that I couldn't quite follow the design I wanted was that there had just been a bit too much wood already removed when I got it. Wouldn't be a problem for a normal bat, but for the intended short and fat one I had in mind, it meant that I had to scale it back a bit.
If you look about 3/4 of the way down the blade, you can see a bit of a knot. It worried me at the time as you can see how the pressing hadn't managed to push the face down there. It was probably raised by about 2-3 mm right across the face. More on that later.
Here's a shot of me planning the templates for shaping the edges and back. I found in this case the easiest thing to do was to do the design on the computer first, then print it out full-scale, cut out the things I needed, and use those to make better templates out of thin MDF. I actually got 2 part-mades at the same time - the other one is a (bad) work in progress. You can see how much I planned to chop off the toe of this one though.
Here's how much I took off the shoulders and toe initially. The shoulders needed a fair bit of extra shaping to get them down to what I wanted, but I was just being cautious with the jigsaw. Same went for the toe too, when I wanted to take off a bit more weight. For those interested, the removed parts didn't really save that much weight in the end: 2 shoulder pieces were 0.7 oz combined, toe piece was 0.6 oz. Was kind of hoping for more of a weight saving, but there we go.
Here are the dropped shoulders. I tried to make the bottom part of the handle a bit more oval, as it feels more comfortable to me, and you can see it's a bit skinnier there.
I didn't do any concaving at all on this, as I wanted it to have plenty of wood no matter where I mis-hit it!
And that knot. What a pain that was. As I tried to sand the face level, more and more of the knot revealed itself, and it was a bit nasty. Some real dark, dead wood in places, so I really spent a fair bit of time sanding as much of it away as possible. It's not ideal, but it's only for me.
Anyway, the final profile. It ended up being a little different to my planned design, just because the part-made didn't have enough wood in the edges or middle to get what I wanted. But I still quite like it, and can't wait to try it out in the nets soon.
Final measurements:
toe: 12 - 27 mm
edge: 37 mm
swell: 63 mm
shoulder: 16 mm
weight: 2 lbs 10.4 oz
blade length: 530 mm
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Topic: First home made bat - designed by artificial intelligence (Read 27719 times)