“From a woodturning standpoint, making wooden baseball bats is actually a pretty basic technique,” says Dan Little. “It goes from billet to bat on the lathe.”
His 12- and 14-year-old sons both play youth baseball, and Little keeps busy during practices by whittling in the stands. A couple of years ago, he set himself a challenge of making a “fungo bat” — a long, slender bat that coaches or parents use during practice. “It’s something I’d use with my kids, so I just thought, ‘this is something I want to try,’” Little says.
“As soon as I made that bat, the kids were like, ‘well, I want a bat,’ so they each got a bat,” Little says. Then he showed one to a coworker whose son also plays baseball, and…