Thanks for the interesting information!
Sven,
Thank you very much for sharing your knowledge on the construction of fukuro-shinai. About a year ago, I was asked to make a presentation weapon for a visiting sensei from Japan, as I had some experience making different weapons for our club. We practice Aikido primarily, but have also been introduced to 'Heart-reflection' style Kenjutsu. In that style, they use a very traditional fukuroshinai that I was asked to reproduce for this gift. Because it had been many years since our Kenjutsu sensei had actually made one of these shinai, he had forgotten some of the details of construction, and had to dismantle one of his that had worn out the leather. I noticed a few differences between his and what you have posted here that I would like to note for comparison. Probably the first and most obvious was that the bamboo had been soaked in an oil and then had all the sharp edges sanded down to prevent excess wear on the inside of the fukuro. The leather used was also 4-4.5 oz. deer hide (bleached white), with a small leather cap to cover just the tip of the bamboo, (with its own leather ties down to the handle.) Another interesting difference was the use of a cord made from horsehair to bind the bamboo slats about mid-way down the "blade" portion, down to the handle. Sensei explained the purpose of this was to help hold the bamboo in shape, and to provide some small amount of padding to help distribute impact. Lastly, the leather was layered in 7-8 coats of clear lacquer (sanding between each coat,) to provide a smooth firm surface to the weapon. In making the gift, I pretty much stuck to this, with two fairly minor variations: The first was the addition of a small rounded-end wooden dowling placed between the bamboo slats at the tip and extending into the bamboo until it encountered the first inner node. This was added to help prevent the bamboo slats from twisting and interlacing during use, and to help protect the outer fukuro from excess wear from the bamboo a the tip. The second variation was in the horse-hair cord. The original cord appeared to have been made by grabbing small hanks of hair and twisting them together, gradually adding more hair until an appropriate length of cord was achieved. This appeared to me to be quite a difficult process to get right, and one that caused the cord to be extremely variable in thickness along the lenght. It also looked quite messy, with lots of random hair sticking out at odd angles. I did some internet searching, and found some instruction on making horsehair cord used in fly fishing. Using these instructions as a base, I made a very consistent diameter cord that was both strong and clean. The method is fairly simple (I can email anyone interested a PDF with instructions.) but quite time-consuming. I've since made a couple more of these, and I think that the overall process is quite straight-forward, such that anyone with a little bit of time and patience can make a good-quality and usable piece of equipment.
Dan Lamb,
Aikidoka
West Kelowna, BC, Canada