The birth of a bike polo mallet

I've recently been introduced to the interesting sport of bike polo (or more specifically "Hardcourt Bike Polo"). It's basically polo on bikes, 3 people on a team and your feet cannot touch the ground at any time. If you do touch the ground, you are then out of play and must tap back in at center court at the wall. The sport greatly surprised me with how fun and addicting it is to become better. It's also another reason to do one of my favorite things, build up and ride a bike! Almost everything about bike polo is centered around "do it yourself", which is another enjoyable aspect in my opinion. This past week my friends down at PROJECTiONE helped me build up a polo mallet of my own, as I was pretty clueless about the whole process.

A bike polo mallet begins with a shaft. Where does one acquire these shafts? Ski poles! A quick trip down to a local thrift store with my trusty bike trailer and I had about a dozen poles to work with, all for $5.

Next stop, the PROJECTiONE workshop. These guys are awesome at what they do: laser cutting, welding, basically anything creative. My next big decision was which pole I wanted to use for this mallet. This is very important, it's like your Pimp Cane on the court. I ended up choosing a cool white one, surely from the 1980s with "Racing GIPRON" printed on the side of it. It's obvious that GIPRON backwards is NOR Pig, some sort of weird logical riddle that will stump my opponents and allow me extra time to score.

Now that my trusty pole has been chosen,
I stripped all the extra parts from it and measured against other mallets to gauge how long I wanted it to be. Next step: Chop!

As my new shaft lay there on the ground bleeding out, we made a quick trip to the hardware store to buy, um, some hardware. The basic idea is to drop a nut (we used a coupling nut to keep it straight) down the shaft from the top and thread a bolt in from the bottom, pulling the mallet head tight.

Utilizing my extensive computer graphic skills I have created an intricate diagram to further explain this step.

We ran into a slight problem here. The nut was too wide to fit far enough down the shaft for the bolt to catch.


Kyle knew exactly what to do.



Conclusion:

Sparks are cool.






Almost done! The next step is to file some teeth into the very end of the shaft so it bites in the mallet head (a tube of UHMW Polyethylene). Drop the nut in, thread the bolt nice and tight and you've got a shiny new mallet to go smack some balls with. You can drill holes into the mallet head to get the weight where you'd like it to be, I'm still experimenting with what I want. I wrapped some old bar tape around the handle to provide a nice grip, and stuck a bouncy ball on the end for some flair. Sadly the bouncy ball didn't last long in actual play, and I'm now in search of a cool new top to my polo mallet.

If you're interested at all in bike polo, I urge you to look for a group in your area, we play here in Muncie at least once a week (Wednesdays at 6:30 behind Savage's Ale House). Check out our group for more info!

cheers