Those knives pictured arenât iron-wood (I wish!!), but are actually made out of standard issue plywood believe it or not.
GM,
Those knives are a LOT lighter than metal ones. Training with wooden Bot Cham Do is cool because when training with metal blades it is sometimes easy to get a bit lazy and let the weight of the knife make the cut, rather than using proper technique.
Wooden knives force you to use proper technique all the way through each cutting motion in order to keep the blades in their proper path.
Also, wooden knives are a bit more forgiving on your kung fu brotherâs body when playing Chi Do.
At the same time you wouldnât want to train with the wooden blades exclusively because you need the weight and feel of a metal blade. My âwoodâ is just a nice addition to my equipment repertoire that helps on the pure technique aspect.
One is weak because he makes preparations against others;
he has strength because he makes others prepare against him.
â Sun-Tzu
Watchman, thanks for the info regarding the use of the wooden knives. Very interesting, and it certainly makes a lot of sense to incorporate wooden knives into training.
JKM, interesting - we have a species of wood in northern Australia also called Ironwood. It wouldnât be the same species as the Chinese one though (since ours is a Eucalypt), but has the same qualities of hardness and weight.
Anyway, I donât live up there any longer but now live in the southern desert area where thereâs lots of beautiful, fine-grained, ebony-like heavy wood (mostly red, brown or cream-coloured though, not black). Itâs mostly different species of Acacia, Eucalyptus and Casuarina. Itâs been used successfully to make high-quality stringed and woodwind instruments here, in the USA and in Europe. I can get hold of quite a bit of kiln-dried stuff here, as Iâm invlolved in the wood-working industry.
When I get time over the next few weeks Iâm going to make a pair of Bat Cham Do out of some of the local wood (Iâll use a red coloured one) and will post pictures here when theyâre finished.