Motivation and Deliverables

     The combination of being lifelong baseball fans/players and having an interest in the science behind sports has resulted in the idea to design and create our own wooden baseball bats. Apart from being something that just our group is interested in, wood bats are becoming more popular around baseball. The major and minor leagues have always used wood bats, but college, high school, and little leagues have traditionally used metal bats, until recently. With the technological improvements in metal bats, they have reached a point where certain materials and construction techniques are being banned for the reason of player safety. One of the main differences between metal and wood bats is that a ball flies off a metal bat much faster than a wood bat. This is concerning to the safety of the pitcher who stands just 60’6” away from the batter. Because of this, many leagues are only allowing players to hit with wood bats.
     Of the wood bat variety, both maple and white ash woods are used for bats. We have decided to do our experiment solely on white ash for several reasons: it is currently much more popular in the major leagues, it is the cheaper of the two, and white ash trees are grown locally in Pennsylvania.  

     Beyond the large market for wood bats, this project will be a great way for each of the group members to learn a great deal about several things such as: CNC machining, MATLAB, 3D printing, accelerometer uses, physics concepts, test procedure design, and machine and tool use.
     The project follows several technical challenges. The first will be to design and build an effective testing procedure that will offer consistent and correct data about the location of the sweet spot on existing wood baseball bats. We will then take what we learn from this data and once we finalize several designs, we will use the CNC lathe to create them.

     After the bat is created, we will conduct the first test over again so we can compare our bat to bats that are currently on the market. The final test will be to take the bats to a batting cage and test out the bats in a more traditional sense. Just because we find that a bat has a large sweet spot, doesn’t meant that it will be a bat that feels comfortable to the batter.

     Our desired outcome is to have a physical bat that is just as good as one that a major leaguer would use. 

     The project will be broken down into two basic sections. The first will be the data gathering and research section, from this we hope to gather information from different bat samples. We hope to be able to present the data in a way that clearly shows how different design aspects affect the vibration and sweet spot. The goal of this will be to show that there is some connection between the location of the ball striking the bat and the energy transferred. The second part will be to this design and test a final prototype. The goal is to have our bat have a better energy transfer over a larger area of the barrel.

Abstract

     The final goal of our Freshman Design project is to create a custom wood baseball bat that has the largest “sweet spot” possible. The “sweet spot” is the location on the bat where the most energy is transferred to the ball, resulting in the best possible hit. To do this, we will start by testing on existing quality wood bats. This will give us an idea of the general design of bats and how that affects the location and size of the “sweet spot”. From what we learn from these tests, we will design our own bat that we will then have turned on a CNC lathe. After the bat is created, we will redo the initial test to our bat to compare it to what is available on the market. Finally, we will take it to a batting cage where we will conduct qualitative tests on it to see how it performs in a real life scenario.