The Pole Cat World Championships are a one-disc only competition at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park Disc Golf Course. Founded in 2019 by Harper Alexander, last year’s Pole Cat World Championships, fondly known as PoCaWoCha, was the largest and most popular to date. Over 300 people played the 2022 tournament over the course of three days, including touring pros such as Jeremy Kohling, Matty O, Juliana Korver, Joel Freeman, Philo Brathwait, and 2022 co-champion Nick Hanson.
The original plaque of champions featured a mounted yellow DX Polecat. I offered to create a custom dyed disc to replace the stock DX Polecat, and Harper agreed. A group of polecats is known as a “chine” (rhymes with “shine”) so I proposed the text “CHINE OF CHAMPIONS” in an arc around an original Polecat from Innova’s initial runs. The original image of the polecat that appears on discs is very granular, with a lot of pixilation and bleeding.
Even if a stencil cutting machine could translate this image into a stencil, it was going to look very sloppy.
It took a few hours in Photoshop to clean up the image, completely re-drawing every line, removing a lot of the shading, and trying to bring out the cat’s strong points, mainly
the eyes, the whiskers, and the paws. This image shows the Polecat cleanup at about 80% complete:
From there, it was a matter of wiping the stamp off of the Star Polecat I’d chosen for the disc. Placing your disc in the freezer for 30 minutes before taking acetone to the stamp helps insure you don’t smear dye from the stamp all over the rest of the disc. Dye likes a warm or hot disc, and will bond more rapidly if the disc is warm.
A freezing cold disc practically repels dye.
Weeded stencil, dye in progress. I opted to hand-paint all of the dye for this, to ensure I got the color and saturation I wanted. The end result was a crisp, clean black cat and clean, vibrant green lettering.
The final result, mounted to the trophy and everything:
