Mini Bat Failure

Today while working on my mini bat, it snapped in half. All the work I did on it was lost. However, it is not a waste because I got more practice on the lathe. When I started working on the bat again today I had a bad feeling because it was getting jumpy. The scaled down dimensions were just too small and I didn't have the foresight to know that working a large piece of wood down to a half inch diameter would put too much stress on the wood and break it. This wont be a concern for the full size bat because the smallest cut is an inch in diameter which won't put a large amount of stress on the block. I am a bit disappointed that the mini bat didn't work out exactly because I was looking forward to having it in the end to look at compared to my full size bat. 

Here are the two halves of the bat after it snapped. On the right is the barrel and the left is what would have become the handle.