What is the benefit of boning a wood bat barrel?

Whether you’re new to wood bats or not, you have probably heard players talk about boning their wood bat barrel.

Boning wood baseball bats has been around for a long time, and the simple definition is to compress the wood on the barrel in order to make a wood bat more dense.

Players back in the day used a large dried out bone to compress their bats, hence the phrase “boning” their bats.  The bone was bolted to a table or bench in the clubhouse, and the players would rub the wood bat barrel across the bone, while applying as much pressure as they could.  The outcome of this process was a wood bat barrel that had compressed grains/fibers, making the wood harder.

The obvious benefit to using a wood bat in which the barrel has gone through the bone hardening process, is that it will make that wood bat barrel even more dense than before.  A denser piece of wood is a harder piece of wood.  And using a wood bat with denser wood will make the ball come off the bat at a higher speed, and giving it more distance.

Any species of wood bat can be boned.  In the early days it was limited to hickory and ash, because those were the only two wood species used in wood bat production at the time.  Boning the barrels of hickory wood bats and ash wood bats would help prevent flaking and chipping of the grains.

At MaxBat, we designed and custom-built an automated boning machine to compress and harden each and every wood bat that we produce.  Just another way that we take your wood bat and make it extra special.