Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Darbin Orvar: Baseball Bat from Rough Sawn Lumber”.
Hi, i’m lynn from the german order youtube channel. Well today, i’m going to make a new bat modeled after this nearly 60 year old, classic baseball bat using rough sun, maple and walnut. So let’s get building well, it all starts with the wood of course. So i’m looking over the walnut and the maple and marking out the good sections for the bat, giving myself a little extra room, the wood, i’m cutting up measures 40 inches and then marking out the pieces of maple as well and then cutting everything up on the Miter saw the walnut is a touch too wide, so i’m cutting off a small section on the table saw next, i’m bringing out my diy jointer i made earlier in the summer.
It’S basically a power, planer turned upside down. This is where the maple is from. It was a pretty big piece of wood that i first worked with using the power planer. Now the wood is in more manageable shape. However, the boards still need to be jointed and then working the walnut as well, which is in pretty rough shape. Once all the pieces were pretty well jointed, i ran them all through the thickness planer and it does a good job of cleaning up the boards. It’S important that both sides of the walnut are flat, since that will be sandwiched in between the maple.
Okay: let’s go in the shop and glue these boards together, so lining up my pieces and i always like to use parchment paper when doing glue up nice. So nothing sticks to the bench, i’m putting on a pretty liberal amount of glue making sure i get good coverage everywhere and then we just need a lot of clamps, let it dry and remove later in the evening. So now, when the boards are glued up, i’m running them through the jointer again to clean up the edge, i’m also finalizing the size and cutting off the sides. Now it’s time to make this a block, so i cut off the one side here, a little at a time, then i realized this side. Wasn’T quite straight so i took it back in the shop and planed some of the high spots down by hand, and then i could cut up the wood with a straight side and get my blank time to mark the piece. So i’m finding the center and marking out a circle which represents the barrel of the bat now to make it a little easier to turn i’m removing the corners and trying to get a more roundish blank before i put it on the lid. Well, that is looking pretty good and on the right here i have all the scraps. So at this point the blank weighs 6 pounds – 3 ounces or 2.8 kilos. If you prefer that okay so time to move the jointer out of the way to make room for the lathe, so i’m putting on an extension, because this is a very large piece of wood to turn, then defining the middle. A little more.
With an awl and putting it on the lathe, so now it’s finally time to start turning, i’m using my roughing gauge here and at first it’s simply about centering and rounding. The wood i like to take my time go slowly then move the tool rest and so on. It takes a while to get it round and it’s always deceiving with a lathe, because you think you’re at a round point when it’s spinning, but then you stop it and you still have edges okay. So i’m getting there it’s getting round and i’m working here on getting the entire piece, the width of the widest piece on the bat and then checking how smooth it is at this point – and it looks pretty good so new day, let’s mark out exactly how wide The knob should be so finding the diameter and marking it out on the blank. So now i start with bringing the one side down to that measurement.
Once i get a little further along, i bring up the old bat every now and then – and i find the diameter of a section mark that spot on my piece and then work on getting that area down to that measurement. I mean it’s really just a slow process of marking bringing the wood down in between different sections. I try to roughly work with one section at a time.
The most annoying part to turn is the thin section in the middle, because there’s a lot of vibration because there isn’t a whole lot of support there, so i try to take it really slow and not take too much off at a time initially, i had started The lathe on the slow speed, because this is a really big piece, but now i’m bringing up the speed slightly by adjusting it here and then continuing to work. My way up, i have changed the tool here now from the roughing gauge to the carbide tools and i’m using a square as well as a round tip working on the knob here, rounding the corner. Now, once i had a shape, i was pretty pleased with. I decided to move on to sanding and really smoothen out any tiny bumps that way, so i started with 80 grit did that for quite a while and then moved up to 220 and then 320..
I think a baseball bat needs a marking. So here we go also while it’s still on the lid, i’m finishing it with some tung oil wax polish to smoothen it out and really bring the color out. I love finishing pieces on the lid, it’s so cool and it’s super smooth then to remove i’m just using a japanese sock, cutting all around almost all the way through on both ends and then taking it off the lathe and just cutting off that last piece and It looks good so cool to make a baseball bat, of course, to make sure i don’t confuse my bat with any other wonder girls out there. I thought a little labeling would be nice, so there we have it. I think it looks really nice. So this is why it’s fun making your own stuff.
I mean, i just love the way it came out, so i modeled this bat off this old, mickey mantle bat from the late 50s and it’s very similar in terms of shape and size. So that is really cool. Of course, mine is made with walnut and maple, which looks very different and really awesome. The final dimensions of this one turned out to be 34 inches and it weighs just a little over 32 ounces. So yeah really really love the way it came out such a fun project. My name is lynn.
Don’T forget to check out my youtube channel darvanover, where you can find lots more projects. Thank you guys. So much for watching and i’ll see you soon. If you liked this video subscribe to our website or send us a comment on facebook or twitter be sure to check out our other project videos or visit us on makezine.com, you .