Cool! My dad did about the same thing to an old muzzleloading shotgun stock he made for me years ago. Guess that would work with a ball bat too!

God Bless, Louis

I do that with walking sticks made from sotol stalks, and with atlatl dart shafts. But I don't use motor oil -- sometimes just Johnson's paste wax rubbed in hot and hard.

Thanks all for watching. Bill, you have an atlatl? Kill anything with it?

Tomahawker, the only thing I have killed with my atlatls was a near-life-size plywood mammoth with foam kill zone that I made for a primitive arts gathering many years ago. The kids sure had fun with it.
Lots of info on atlatls at PaleoPlanet, and lots of plans here. A word of advice: pass on the Alaskan board atlatls at first. They can be painful to use unless you get the geometry right for your hand.
My favorites are simple "Basketmaker" style atlatls.

http://www.thudscave.com/npaa/designs/

Here is a poster I made for that first "Bending Bow" event 16 years ago. I used this mammoth shape to create the target.

fullsizeoutput_1470 by ComeWatson, on Flickr

Thanks for sharing. I've seen a similar torch heat method used with a sheet metal "mask" to emulate tiger striping on plain stock wood.

I did that with my Tomahawk over 25 years ago. The only thing that I did not do was rub it down with the same oil. I love its look and it is one wicked and accurate weapon.

Nice looker of a handle. Be Well, Packy

This is pretty much the way that we used to do our wood baseball bats.
I think the heat opens up the grain at the surface and then the pine tar (or whatever wax/sap you wanted) better absorbed into the wood.
I saw a lot of batters using rosin bags to rub down their bats but a hot bat would suck the tar into the grain and from then on, it wouldn’t need much else.
I actually preferred a smoother, less sticky bat. Johnson’s floor wax is what I liked. Didn’t use a batters glove either so maybe that had something to do with it.

In my younger years when I was actually using axes as tools. I replaced a lot of ax handles.

Never thought about adding and extra step to then process.

Shucks, even Stone Age people took time to decorate their possessions.

I used to carry one in my gun rack in the pickup. Folks started to call me Lester Maddox.