When crafting Zoa, team members approached each component of the bat individually, optimizing the pieces separately before assembling the desired final product. “Our thought was, let’s use all these new tools that we have to try and do something that we haven’t done before.”ĭeMarini engineers pushed Zoa toward the finish line throughout 2020, quickly turning around prototypes for playtesting and generating user feedback. “We hadn’t tried that in a BBCOR application yet,” Raagas said of Continuous Fiber Technology. DeMarini Player Insights & Anticipation Engineer Ryan Raagas said Continuous Fiber Technology had not been used in the upper levels of baseball. Years of revisions and hundreds of prototypes resulted in Zoa, a bat crafted with Continuous Fiber Technology to redefine the composite BBCOR hitting experience. The DeMarini D-Lab team spent four years fine-tuning the composite manufacturing process and refining weight distribution, feel, sound and the overall hitting experience.
Zoa, top, features a larger optimized hitting zone, or sweet spot, than its predecessors in the DeMarini lineup.Įvery component of Zoa, from handle to end cap, was engineered from scratch to push the limits of our modern design toolbox. With a pair of polycarbonate discs in the barrel, Zoa features a reinforced Continuous Fiber Barrel technology, maintaining barrel integrity and allowing for the larger optimized hitting area. However, after years of research and hundreds of prototypes, Zoa’s barrel construction was finalized.
This process proved to be extremely difficult to translate to Baseball, as the larger barrels and steeper taper to the handle posed unique challenges. “This translates into a higher batted ball velocity in the areas slightly outside of the hitting area.” “The Zoa design substantially increases this usable, maximum performance area of the bat beyond any previous DeMarini design or current competitor offerings,” Loeffler said. Through this manufacturing process, the DeMarini D-Lab team crafted Zoa to feature a consistent wall thickness and a larger optimized hitting area, affectionately known as the sweet spot. Zoa and other DeMarini bats crafted with Continuous Fiber Technology are manufactured by rolling the composite material upon itself, creating our most consistent composite barrel ever while efficiently distributing weight where needed. The Process – Manufacturing Continuous Fiber Technology
Through this process, DeMarini engineers set out to build a BBCOR composite bat that would redefine the BBCOR hitting experience. The process lengthens carbon fibers along the barrel to improve consistency and performance in composite bats. Continuous Fiber Technology is already a critical manufacturing process in several DeMarini fastpitch and slowpitch softball bats, and we refined the technology to bring it to baseball.
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