Turning a Baseball Bat Pen

by Dennis Daudelin

(click any picture to make it larger)

This project started when I wanted to turn something for a group of teenage boys who were going to be attending a Christmas party at my house with their parents. I knew that it might be a boring day for them and wanted to do something that would spice it up and might even create some interest in the lathe for them.

Since they are all big Red Sox fans, I decided to make baseball pat pens for them. I didn't want to use a standard pen kit for the set-up as I wanted this to a be a fast, and easy project to pull off. They were arriving in a couple of hours. I know, nothing like waiting until the last minute.

So, I ran out to the store and bought a page of 10 Bic pens. I pulled all the pen inserts out with a pair of needle nose pilers. And then I was ready to turn!

I started out with a 3/4" square length of ash that was 8" long. You could any type of hardwood that you would. I marked the tail stock end of the blank and then mounted about 1" of the length into my scroll chuck. I used the live center point to drive a small indent into the blank as a starting point for the drilling operation.

I started the drilling with a short 1/8" drill bit in my Jacob chuck. The drilling goes slow and I was only able to get about 1/4" depth before it could tell that the drill had stopped cutting, meaning that the flutes were full of chips. I stopped and cleaned them out each time that happened. After I reached the full length of the drill bit, I switched to a long 1/8" bit which I got at my local hardware store. I continued drilling until I hit 5" deep.

It is very easy for the slim drill bit to follow the grain (which is not in the center of the blank). Slow, clean cutting is key here! Or this happens - a side blow-out!

After the drilling is successful, I roughed the blank round using a 1 1/4" roughing gouge.

Once the blank was round, I marked the 6" length that I planned to use with a pencil.

Then on the tailstock end of the blank, I started turning a thin bead that would represent the end of the bat where you hold onto it.

Here is the thin bead nearing completion...

Then I started roughing the shape of the bat. Once again I used my larger roughing gouge making this a very easy project!

In this picture, I've roughed out the bat shape and created a one sided bead for the end of the bat.

Here is the bat with the final sanding and the end of the bat cut down with a parting tool. Now I'll use a small back saw and cut the final project off the lathe and hand sand both ends. I put a sanding sealer on the bat on the lathe and then some beeswax.

Here are 2 of the 10 pens that I made in one sitting!

This is a very simple project with a very simple result and it excels because of it!