Hello, first post. Looking for help finding black willow lumber or billet to make a reproduction replica of a late 1800’s baseball bat for display. Let’s Play Two. Thanks!
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Look around ponds and lakes. Willow grows like a weed. Shouldn't be hard to find. However, it might be more difficult to get permission to cut one down. You probably won't find any commercially cut lumber.
Bats are usually made of ash, I think. That would probably be easier to find. What is the reason for making it from willow?
Thanks for your tips. Wooden baseball bats are typically made of white ash, pignut hickory, maple and yellow birch but there was a "brief" period (1870's to 1920's) when lightweight (black) willow was also used, perhaps because English cricket bats were made of willow. I'm looking to make a replica willow baseball bat using willow (either black or white) for home display.
I don't know where you live but I have a huge Black Willow that is ready to come down. If you are within a reasonable distance have at it. I am in the western highlands of Virginia. I haven't checked lately but there is usually some branches on the ground blown down during the winter.
Thanks for letting me know! I'm in Texas, but I could find a bat maker closer to you. Any way you can process some of your black willow into 2 billets that I could purchase?
What size billet are you looking for?
3" x 3" x 36" would be great.
I will take a look.
Curious as to why black willow? It's an unusual choice.
You could befriend some tree services to let you know when they had one although processing one yourself, including drying would be a time-consuming effort. Do you have any urban lumber salvage places near you?
Thanks. I'm making reproduction 1870's - 1910's baseball bats for home display. Commonly used woods for early era bats were northern white ash, pignut hickory, yellow birch, while less common woods included (black) willow and cherry.
Willow was probably used because (white) willow was used for fashioning English cricket bats (and still is). Willow is lighter than the other woods while barely exhibiting the bat-ready characteristics of the other woods (and as a fungo bat).
I'm scouting out billets (or dowels) of willow (black or white varieties) to make a couple of replica early-era baseball bats. Trying to cast a wide net for willow sources.
Have you looked on woodfinder.com? There are places that list willow and do mail order. There's one source in Houston. Which I hear is right next to Texas.
Hey, thanks!
Arborica in Marshall CA. Is an astounding industrial complex with a business model of milling lumber from downed trees and removed exotics and ornamental trees, or what I refer to as " road kill". Willows don't have a particularly long life expectancy so the possibility that he may have some ,some willow may have come their way.
Thanks!
I am not an expert on turning, but I had a friend who did it as his life's work. After retirement he started exploring the use of more air-dried, native wood sources. I gave him some cut-offs from cherry limbs stacked on my property. Even though they were 3 years old, and even though they were properly painted to limit checking, many if not all his attempts at turning this wood ended up splitting.
We finally concluded that limb wood is likely different from the main trunk. Limbs often contain a lot of "reaction wood" that the tree builds to keep limbs growing horizontally. This wood can retain locked-in stress that may not be released until the wood is cut or turned. This can result in warping or splitting after machining (cutting, turning etc.). I suspect this is why trunks get slabbed out to make boards and posts at the mill, while limbs are directed toward the chipper.
Even though you don't plan to use the bat in a game, you may not be happy with the result of using limb wood. My friend put wire mesh grills between his lathe and his lighting and still had some of his spindles "blow up" during the turning process with enough violence to break his lights. This can result from either bowing or splitting that allows the billet to be released from the spindles. But even when successful, his limb-wood turnings could also split sometime after completion.
Thanks for this insight.
Willows are hard to definitively identify, they can naturally hydridize. I have what I believe to be a black willow. It's about 30 ' tall and would probably be twice that if I had or the power company had let it. The main trunk of the tree is more than 3 ' in diameter or 10' or so in circumference . At about 10 feet up it branches and those branches are 2' + in diameter. They are the size of trees themselves. From there they branch out to 1' and progress down in size to teeny tiny branches. Constantly pruned I 've managed to keep the canopy at about 40' across. Without the pruning the tree would by now be swallowing the house and blocking the street. It constantly sends up shoots that reach for the sky and I try to encourage the tree to weep which it does not like to do. Inner branches tend to die off from too much shade or maybe just winter , although it doesn't get actually cold here and there hasn't been one frost here this passed winter and still I trimmed out quite a bit of dead wood. I think that a large branch from a tree such as mine would likely produce something like lumber. I think it highly likely that there is a bat in there. Smaller branches would have many knots and not be suitable for much of anything. From pruning it has produced some burls that produce many annoying suckers and I 've removed a couple of those and turned them into vessels. They are fairly dense and hard once dry. I've turned them green and they don't seem to develop cracks or splits which isn't always the case with green turning. Larger branches that have been removed I cut up and they end up with the firewood and I never really though about it before but they don't tend to end check or split when drying. I can see why they use willow for light weight twit baseball bats.
Thanks, Best I can tell, willow wood was used occasionally back in the late 1800's to 1910's for "fungo" bats (an easy to handle lightweight infield practice bat) because it's plentiful and easy to turn. Clearly it's not the best "in game" bat wood (i.e. ash, hickory, maple, and birch).