My Favourite Cricket Bat!!!!

If you’ve been playing cricket for a while you have more then likely had a favourite bat.  Then you’ve bought a bat with the same middle position, same weight, same manufacturer and it’s just not been the same.  So I started to take a look, a techie look that is!!! It ended up being a question and a half mainly due to the maths involved……!!!!!

So what makes a bat feel like it does?

Ok you could say swing weight but it isn’t just that!  It’s the speed of the bat when playing varying shots and how you hold the bat.  Lets remember we are talking about swing feel and hitting areas here!

So this leads onto looking at cricket bats as a combination of things.  Lets look at the cricket bat and break it down….  [Please note: I'm disregardinig bat performance here, so don't comment or email me about that]

• Speed of bat is related to bat weight, the physical bats centre of mass [pivot point], middle position and you
• Your grip, yep you again, how you hold the bat will determine how the bat rotates for pickup and shot playing.

So what does that all related to here, I see you asking….   Something has changed, well lets remember willow is organic you may get a bat that looks exactly the same, weighs the same but feels different.  All of sudden that nice piece of organically grown willow is pain in the a*rse  because the  the centre of mass of the bat has moved or the pivot point rotation down to your grip is slightly askew.. A bat that looks the same isn’t, you can pout a bit here if you like….

Is that it? 

Well no not really… Golfers can select clubs so they have matching feel and tennis players with there rackets so why can’t we do it for cricket!  Well yep we can!  What we need to look at here is Moment of Inertia and some other derivations and a good testing setup!

Moment of Inertia, why?

Well it is kind of this and a bit more and for obivious I don’t want to go to far into it…. Ok back to moment of inertia, we need to derive some stuff from the cricket bat that we use.  Moment of Inertia will tell us the force required to change the velocity of an object, that is, how hard it is for us to move the cricket bat to hit a ball, this in general terms will give the feel of the cricket bat. 

Moment of inertia provides a baseline for us around 2 pivots i.e your grip and physical cricket bat. With a bit of dwiddling and some math derivations due to batting speeds we can get you a matching feel for your cricket bat.  Sounds easy hey, well it requires the original bat for tests against and like I said a good bit of math and then you need to get a cleft and make a replica bat!!!!!

A SAF Custom will do this for you [I would say that I just wrote the article].  I’m also in the process of getting data for other bats such as the Stuart Surridge Jumbo, Turbo 333, GN single Scoop and more to get a database of bat types together….

I hope you found that interesting….

Andy
Podshaver for San Andreas Fault Cricket Bats
Handmade Cricket Bats

Have a Cricket Bat related question email me