Get a bail guard

A few dollars a set, an afternoon of work, and every wicket in your league is safer. We sell nothing and there is nothing to order from us. Here is how to get bail guards onto your stumps.

Make your own

Four inexpensive parts, all standard items from a hardware store. No specialist tools, no 3D printing, nothing to order from us. One set takes a few minutes to put together, and a whole league can be kitted out in an afternoon.

You may need fewer than you think. If your league has a regular panel of umpires, give each umpire one set of guarded bails to carry to whichever ground they are appointed to. A handful of sets then covers a whole season, rather than one per ground.

1Make the partsParts list, quantities and how to assemble kits in bulkPDF 2Fit it to the stumpsOne printable page you can hand to an umpire or a clubPDF 3Watch one being fittedThe same steps on camera, from bare stumps to a guarded wicket90 sec
Bail Guard how-to-install flyer: the labelled parts at rest and on ball impact, MCC Law 8.3.4 quoted, four fitting steps from bottom stopper to bails, two incorrect set-ups to avoid, and a five-point pre-game check.
The one-page install guide. Fit the bottom stopper, then the collar, then the top stopper about three inches above it; the thread should be straight, the collar free to move, and the thread facing the wicketkeeper. Download the PDF to print.

Manufacturers

The design is published under CC BY 4.0 as prior art, so you are free to manufacture and sell bail guards commercially. You do not need our permission and you owe us nothing. The design principles are the brief: what a bail guard has to do, whoever makes it.

Talk to us anyway, because we can probably save you time. There are several working variants of this design, and which one suits you depends on what you already have: your tooling, your materials, whether you are moulding silicone or sourcing off the shelf parts, and how many sets you need. Tell us your constraints and we will suggest the variant that fits them, share what failed in our own trials so you do not repeat it, and point clubs and leagues towards you once you are producing.

Tell us what you are working with

Tell us your story

If you have made your club, your league or your kids’ academy safer with a bail guard, we would love to hear how it went. What your umpires made of it, what you would change, how many sets you ended up making. Send us your story with photos or video and we will add it to this site, so the next league has someone else’s experience to learn from rather than starting cold.

Get in touch

The same form reaches us for anything else, whether that is trying bail guards in your matches, making your own, the design files, or someone to speak to your league. Developers can instead open an issue on the field trial repository.

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