There are only two more days to enter my contest to win a foam baseball bat. The bat is made by a Pittsburgh company called Specter Studios; they use local artists to create and fabricate all the props and costumes they sell. They happily shared some photographs showing the work they do.
They were not making any bats at the time, but they were building some fireman axes, which are made with a similar process.
The axes have a rigid rod buried within them. After they have the foam cast around them, they are sent off to have the colors airbrushed on.
So there you have it: making foam axes in the Steel City.