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Polypropylene works well for shorter stuff, but people complain about longer weapons because of an excess of flexibility (I tend to agree). For example, my Cold Steel Escrima Sticks are pretty great and have held up well, although they've been part-time, and they're short. They make a number of training swords with the same material. I'm not sure how ...

My suggestion, based purely on experience as a wood worker, would be that octagonal staffs would traditionally have been easier to make. The machines we have available these days can bang out nice round dowel pretty easy, but once upon a time, these things would have been make by hand using tools like planes and draw knives. Using tools like that, an ...

Sorry if this is a vague answer, and I don't know the first thing about the Seido karate style, but I remember an instructor (I can't remember what style. Kajukenbo, perhaps?) at a martial arts camp once telling me that they only taught weapons at black belt level to avoid weapons bias. The idea was that a practitioner should be fully proficient in empty ...

More often than not, it's not worth the trouble (unless you're sentimental about the staff). A white oak jo is not terribly expensive. @Campbeln is right. Here's one way to straighten a warped jo: What you'll need: Three 1x4s longer than the jo One large wooden clamp for every foot of the jo. Boiled linseed oil What to do: Sand the jo. This will ...

I'm very pleased with Autrelle Holland's Aiki-jo manual, which contains the Suburi and Kihon (I believe those are what you refer to as "small kata". I've also been impressed with Stanford Aikido's discussion of the Jo Suburi, which contains some very precise, practical advice and a wonderful sense of humor. Of course for video the Saito Aiki-Ken and ...

Fascinating question; I'd like to know the answer. I found one potential answer:"The octagonal cut of all the staffs also gives you nice surface contours for locks and submissions." Several sources (none of which are reliable enough to quote) imply that octagonal weapons are associated with Okinawan martial arts, but that seems to be in the context of the ...

Wounding deeply from a distance--that's pretty much the job description of spears, pikes, yari, and the 57 other varieties of pointy pole weapons. Their "stand off" nature lets you deliver aggressive thrusts from the relative safety of several meters back. If needed, you can quickly move the weapon through a double-cone of positions for blocking. So, yes. ...

Look to other sports where heavy contact is common. I play ice hockey and we have wooden, aluminium and "composite" sticks that handle the punishment of other similar implements slashing and crashing into them (not to mention the odd head or leg strike >=). Of course what is actually available on market is another question entirely! Other then the odd ...

There is also a small glass rod type tool that you can find at better billiard/pool stores. It's designed to be rubbed along the pool cue to raise the dents that can occur through normal play. It will also work if the wood is already lacquered, where the steam trick (Which is quite useful) won't work on sealed wood.

Dave Lowry wrote a book each on bokken and jo work: Bokken, Art of the Sword and Jo: Art of the Japanese Short Staff These go through basics as well as single and partner kata. Lowry has also written many books on Japanese martial arts that explore philosophy, culture, and experience, all of which you can easily find on Amazon. He has a polished written ...

Century Martial Arts advertises their smallest bamboo toothpick starting at 12 oz. That would be the 50" (4' 2") variety. The lightest fiberglass I could find in a non-exhaustive search was still 1 lb. 5 oz. If that's too heavy, the student should train so it is not too heavy. Lifting weights with proper form and properly trained supervision can be a safe ...

I would go for a rubber gun. The ones we have weight more or less like a normal Beretta m92 but are much safer than hard plastic ones, for obvious reasons. I would go for a dark colour, as the bright yellow ones we have draw too much attention, less so a real gun. Finally, for safety reasons, we have manually removed the trigger guard. We decided to cut it ...

Realism is key- you will really want a mock gun to weigh the same as a real one, otherwise it will not move as you expect, especially if you are in a country like the UK, where guns are unfamiliar to most. You are also going to use slightly different techniques to disarm someone with a pistol or a semi-automatic so if you want to learn those techniques, ...

Octagonal weapons are less prone to torque out of your grip; same reason bolt heads aren't round–the flat edges give the weapon a means to find purchase, against the bones and skin of the hand. Whether it's enough of an advantage to prevent disarming, different issue. the disarms we practice in my FMA classes aren't turn-the-stick-on-its-axis disarms. ...

I wouldn't use any of Cold Steels training weapons for their intended purpose. I use their bokken as a cutlass by cutting down the handle, and adding a better hilt. That's about it. I highly recommend The Knight Shop and Purple Heart's trainers. While they both have mostly WMA stuff, I'm sure if enough EMA folks ask they'll start making katana and other ...

Polyoxymethylene (aka Delrin, acetal, polyacetal, and polyformaldehyde) and other similarly dense thermoplastics can be used for many substitute training weapons including, but not limited to (in my personal experience), bokken, bo, jo, hanbo, training knives, jitte, kunai, and training shuriken (with thin plates). For staves, it's often best to order them ...

LARP weapons would do if you wanted something that could safely hit somebody else. Note that many of them cannot safely be used for stabbing although some can -- please check before buying.

While @slugster is most likely correct (though as you're not likely to take it into battle, I don't think it's a huge issue if the integrity is effected slightly), my grandfather used to intentionally warp wood for furniture using a saltwater soak for a number of hours (days?) then placed the wood into a frame for shaping. This may be do-able in the reverse. ...

Morihiro Saito's Traditional Aikido Volume One (ISBN: 0870402668) includes jo and bokken kata and suburi. It seems to be out of print, but you can find used copies for (as of this writing) around $80-$150. As far as I can tell, his newer Takemusu Aikido series doesn't include the basic jo and bokken techniques at all, but there are some weapon-related ...

Sounds to me like you might do something wrong when switching grip on the staff that makes your hands wonder of towards one end. Another useful tip is to keep your elbows in with your body (tie your belt around your arms and waist) to force yourself to use your body rather than your arms to spin the bo. This also restricts movement of the hands/arms and ...

If you have mechanical dents in the wood -- not broken fibers/splintering -- there's a wood working trick you can use to raise the dents: Get an iron, put it on highest heat setting. Take a clean rag wet, but not dripping. Fold the rag so a wet corner of the rag covers the dent -- touch the iron to the rag. The idea is to flash the water into steam with that ...