Dream. Play. Rise.
Why We Only Make 40 Cricket Bats a Day
A handmade bat takes around 23 manual processes and nine hours of craftsman time. A machine-assisted one takes about three. This is what that difference actually means — and what we give up to work the slow way.
A large manufacturer said something on a podcast recently that most of the industry knows and almost nobody admits out loud. He makes around three thousand bats a day. And he was honest enough to say that at that volume, real love can only be given to a chosen few. The rest go out as they are.
We want to be careful here, because that was an honest answer to a fair question and it deserves a fair response. He is not doing anything wrong. Most of the world’s cricket is played with affordable bats, and somebody has to make them at a price a fourteen-year-old’s parents can actually pay. Volume manufacturing is what puts a bat in the hands of a kid in a Meerut gully or a Lahore side street or a Kingston schoolyard. That is a genuinely good thing to do.
But it does mean something for you, if you are the one buying.
We make a maximum of forty bats a day. This article explains what actually happens in those hours, why forty is the ceiling rather than a marketing number, and — honestly — what we lose by refusing to go faster.
The nine hours nobody talks about
Comparisons of traditional and modern bat manufacturing put the difference starkly. A bat made the traditional way involves roughly 23 separate manual processes and around nine hours of craftsman time. The same bat produced with specialised machinery handling most of those stages reduces human input to about three hours.
Both bats are legal. Both are English willow. Both will look broadly similar in a shop. And on an average cleft, both will play perfectly well.
The difference is not really about hours. It is about how many decisions are made by a person looking at that specific piece of willow.
- Preset profile applied regardless of cleft
- Fixed pressing schedule for every blade
- Shaping to a template, not to the wood
- Grading often done in batches by eye at speed
- Excellent consistency, genuinely low cost
- Profile shaped to the cleft’s own density
- Pressing adjusted to that blade’s moisture and grain
- Drawknife and plane work by eye and feel
- Every cleft graded individually before it is cut
- Slower, costlier, and it cannot be scaled easily
Process and timing figures reflect widely reported comparisons of traditional versus modern bat manufacturing across the industry.
What actually happens to a cleft
Here is the real sequence in our workshop, with honest timings. Most of these stages have a machine equivalent that is faster. We use machines where a machine is genuinely better — a spindle moulder cuts a shoulder more accurately than any human — and hands where hands are better.
Cleft selection & grading
Every cleft is inspected individually for grain count, grain straightness, spacing, colour and structural faults. Clefts are sorted into grades and anything unsound is rejected outright. This is where a bat is really decided.
Moisture check
Willow that is too wet will not hold a profile; too dry and it turns brittle and cracks under pressing. Each cleft is checked before it goes anywhere near the press.
Cutting & facing
The cleft is cut oversize, then the face is planed to reveal the grain properly. Only now can the true grain quality be judged, and some clefts get re-graded at this point.
8-stage hydraulic pressing
Compressed gradually across eight stages rather than the two to four common in volume production, with pressure adjusted to that blade’s density. The single stage that most determines how the bat will play and how long it will last.
Handle preparation & splice
Layered cane handles with rubber insertions to absorb shock, cut to a V-splice and glued under pressure. The joint is left to cure fully overnight — a stage that simply cannot be rushed.
Profile shaping
Spine height, swell position, concaving and edges cut by hand with drawknife and plane, to the player’s specification and to what the cleft itself will support. Weighed repeatedly throughout.
Sanding & finishing
Progressive sanding from coarse to fine, then buffing. Cosmetic, but also the final structural inspection — faults hidden under rough wood show up here.
Binding, grip, engraving
Handle bound with twine for strength, grip fitted, stickers applied, and the player’s name laser-engraved on the blade if requested.
Oiling, knocking in & toe guard
Light oiling, then knocking in to compress the face and edge fibres, and a toe guard fitted. This is why our bats arrive ready to play rather than needing weeks of mallet work.
Final QC & photographs
Weight verified against the order, face and edges checked, splice inspected, and photographs sent to the player before the bat is packed.
The stage that cannot be automated
If you gave us one hour per bat instead of nine and asked which stage we would protect, it would not be shaping. It would be grading.
Every cleft arrives different. Two pieces of willow cut from the same tree on the same morning can have different densities, different grain spacing, different moisture, different hidden faults. Grading is the act of looking at one specific piece of wood and deciding what it is capable of becoming — and, sometimes, that it should not become a bat at all.
A machine can measure a cleft. It cannot look at slightly wavy grain running off the edge, weigh that against unusually good density, and decide this one will make a superb club bat but not a player-grade one. That is a judgement made by someone who has handled tens of thousands of clefts.
“You are not really making a bat. You are finding out what that piece of willow already wants to be.”
Utkarsh — Co-founder, Ciel SportsAt high volume, grading has to happen fast and in batches. That is not carelessness; it is arithmetic. If three thousand bats must leave a building each day, nobody can spend forty-five minutes with each cleft. So grading becomes sorting: broadly right, most of the time, on average clefts.
It is on the unusual clefts that the difference shows. The one with brilliant density and imperfect looks that gets downgraded and sold cheap. The pretty one with a hidden weakness that gets sold as premium. Both are honest mistakes made at speed — and both end up in somebody’s kit bag.
Pressing: where bats are won and lost
Willow arrives soft. Pressing compresses the fibres of the face into a springy, shock-absorbing surface that can survive a hard cricket ball at ninety miles an hour. Willow’s criss-crossing fibres and tiny air pockets are what make it light yet powerful, and pressing is how that potential is turned into performance.
Get it wrong in either direction and the bat is finished before it starts:
- Under-pressed and the face dents, marks and cracks in its first few innings.
- Over-pressed and the willow goes dead. The ping never arrives. Nothing can bring it back.
The correct pressure is not a fixed number. It depends on the density, moisture and grain structure of that specific blade. Every serious maker knows this — the good ones assess each cleft and decide how much pressure it needs rather than running everything at one setting.
We press across eight stages, gradually, rather than the two to four common in volume production. It takes considerably longer and it is the main reason we cannot make three thousand bats a day even if we wanted to. It is also the main reason our bats last.
The arithmetic of forty
You can work this out yourself, and we would rather you did than take our word for it.
Take the total craftsman-hours available in a workshop on a given day. Divide by the number of bats that must leave it. That is how much human attention each bat can receive. There is no way around that division — it is the same arithmetic in every workshop in the world, ours included.
In a traditionally handmade bat, against far fewer when machinery handles most stages.
Roughly three times the human input of a machine-assisted bat.
The most we can make while every bat still gets the full process.
Forty is not a marketing figure. It is the number at which the arithmetic still works — where every cleft can be graded individually, every blade pressed to its own density, every profile shaped by hand to a real person’s specification, and every finished bat photographed and checked before it goes.
Push it to sixty and something has to give. Usually grading goes first, because it is invisible to the customer. Push it to six hundred and the process becomes a different process entirely.
Volume manufacturing is not the enemy of cricket. It is the reason cricket is affordable. A child playing with a two-thousand-rupee bat is a child playing, and that matters more than any argument about craft.
The point is narrower than that. If you are buying a premium bat — if you are spending real money on English willow — you are entitled to ask how much individual attention that particular bat received. Most buyers never think to ask.
Why waste matters more than it used to
There is a second argument for working slowly, and it has nothing to do with performance.
English willow takes roughly fifteen to twenty years to mature before a tree can be harvested. Even then, only around seventy per cent of the wood is usable for bats, with the remainder discarded during production. Meanwhile demand has grown enormously with the global expansion of T20 cricket, and in October 2025 the MCC convened a meeting at Lord’s specifically to discuss willow supply.
Opinions differ on whether this amounts to a genuine shortage. Some willow growers say supply is adequate and that rising bat prices reflect market competition rather than scarcity. Others in the industry see real pressure. We are bat makers, not foresters, so we will not pretend to settle it.
What we can say is narrower and harder to argue with: a piece of willow that took twenty years to grow deserves more than three hours of attention. When a cleft is misgraded, over-pressed or shaped badly, two decades of growth end up producing a bat somebody stops using after a season. That is the waste that bothers us most, and it is entirely avoidable.
What we give up
It would be dishonest to write all this without admitting what the slow way costs us. There are four real prices we pay.
- We cannot supply large orders quickly. When a retailer asks for five hundred bats in three weeks, we usually cannot do it. We have lost real business this way and will lose more.
- We turn work away in peak season. Between August and October, when the southern hemisphere is buying, forty a day is a hard wall. Some people wait, and some go elsewhere. Both are fair.
- Our unit cost is higher than it needs to be. Nine hours of skilled time per bat is expensive. We offset it by selling direct rather than through distributors and retailers, which is the only reason a hand-worked bat can reach you at the prices it does.
- We cannot grow the way a volume maker can. Scaling means either more craftsmen trained to the same standard, which is slow, or dropping the standard, which defeats the point. We have chosen slow.
We are not claiming this is the only right way to make bats. It is a choice with costs attached, and we would rather you knew what they were.
What it actually means for you
Strip away the craft romance and here is what the forty-a-day ceiling buys the person holding the bat.
- Your bat is specified before it is made, not after. Profile, weight, handle shape, size and engraving are decided by you and built to, rather than picked from what happens to be on a shelf.
- The sweet spot sits where you actually hit the ball. This matters more than grade. A correctly specified mid-range bat will out-score a premium bat in the wrong profile, every season.
- Nothing unsound reaches you. Clefts we would not play with ourselves do not become bats, and that decision is made by a person, slowly.
- It arrives ready. Oiled, knocked in, toe guard fitted, weight verified, photographed before dispatch.
- You can ask the maker anything. When you message us, one of the two people who own the workshop replies. That is only possible at forty a day.
Forty bats a day. Every one of them somebody’s. That is not a slogan we invented for a website — it is the constraint we build the business around. If you want a bat made this way, tell us how you bat and we will build for it. If you would rather buy something off a shelf tomorrow, we genuinely understand, and there is nothing wrong with that either.
Questions people ask us
How long does it take to make a cricket bat by hand?
What is the difference between a handmade and a machine-made bat?
Why do some manufacturers make thousands of bats a day?
Does a bespoke bat actually play better?
Is there really a shortage of English willow?
How long does a bespoke bat take to arrive?
Related guides
Nine bats, every one built to order. See what forty a day actually produces.
An honest guide — including three moments we tell you to spend less.
What grain count really tells you about a cleft, and what it does not.
Tell us how you bat.
We’ll build for it.
Your height, the weight you play with, where you score your runs. That is all we need to start. One of us will reply personally — and we will tell you honestly if a less expensive bat is the better buy.
