I wondering if any one knows the wood species. I want to know which wood is the strongest for it's weight. For nunchakus/ escrima/ bo staff purposes. I can easily get birch, but I heard that bamboo/ maple and oak are the stongest. Anyone has an exprience with this?
Bamboo or rataan makes for a relatively stron glight wood...I beleive escrima sticks are typically made of this. Oak (White oak) makes for a heavier denser weapon. Just because a wood is heavy or dense down not make it good for weapons...too dense and you have a cumbersome weapon that's hard to use. I would say look at something like ash. It's a wood commonly used to make handles for lagre hand tools (axes, etc) also the wood used to make the classic "Louisville Slugger" baseball bat. Nice and strong and works well. Peace, Erik
The strongest american hard wood is Black Ironwood I believe... hard to find a weapon in that unless you are doing it yourself.. frankly, I would consider the following: The Bo is made from a variety of hard woods, the strongest traditional "widely" available being the Okinawan Iron Wood. The weight of the staff directly reflects the density of the wood. The heavier the wood, the more densely packed the wood fibers, yielding a tougher outer surface on the staff. The heavy weights like the African exotics, white oak, red oak and hickory will not show the surface nicks and dings from normal use as do the softer woods. Here is a list in order of the commom hardwoods from most dense to least dense: Hickory Black locust White oak Red oak Ash Maple Black walnut Cherry Butternut Poplar Basswood Cedar For Escrima I would consider the following: Kamagong wood is the ultimate weapon for stick-fighting. As hard and heavy as you'll find. A step above rattan is Bahi wood (harder and heavier than the rattan).
Fir is a soft wood. And of those varieties...Southern Yellow Pines rules. However I think Hickroy in addition to ash is antoher good one (totally forgot about that).
Depends on the weapon and intended use. Wood density and strength go hand in hand. For the most part any hardwood is good material for most weapons. A material with straight uniform grain will be better than a wilder grain that will be a little less stable. I'll try to post some examples of what i mean. cordially jason
Here's two examples of maple that will give you a general idea of grain pattern.First is a plain straight grain and the second should be quilted or curly grain. You can see why the straight grain is more stable.
That's a tough question as rigidity is not a good indicator of how resistant to breakage or strong something is, the intended use determines the best material. The hardest wood in the world is snakewood (Brosimum guianense); the hardest in the U.S. is Hickory. In contrast if you look at waxwood (Ligustrum lucidum?) which is softwood by definition, it is actually very dense and very hard to break because of its lack of rigidity, it bends and absorbs impact where a harder wood would splinter.
Rattan wood is usually used because of its springy qualities, and I expect Yew would be good too. However, if you want a hard hard wood: Teak If you can get it into the shape of an escrima stick without blunting your lathe chisel more than 4 times then i congratulate you
interesting post. here is a link to ebay selling a iron wood escrima stick. http://cgi.ebay.com/6-Ironwood-Kama...QcategoryZ47347QQtcZphotoQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem i wonder what kind of beating they wood take.
Hickory. I'd use hickory. There's a reason it's the most used wood for axe handles. There's harder wood out there but the guy you hit won't know the difference Hickory is easy to find just about any where in the U.S. But I don't know about any where else. I know a Pepsi driver who was mugged in his depot in Pontiac by two guys with 2X4's and their made of "yellow pine". They almost killed him. Dave S.
If you're buying, you may as well stick with rattan for escrima. It's traditional for a reason: it's light, strong and hard. BTW, it's different to bamboo. I don't really recommend bamboo for any kind of art where you are whacking things together with no padding. When it goes it's difficult to tell and can cause splinters that can literally kill. That's why apart from for competitions (where the judges often go by sound) kendo shinai are often carbon fibre these days. I don't recommend teak. a) Because two of the three legitimate teak species are endangered, b) because according to the International Timber Trade Federation there maybe in excess of 120 species that are often passed off as teak, c) because any Tectona grandis (the only non-endangered plantation-grown true teak) you get will be plantation-grown and that has a huge difference on the quality of teak (ie; it's weak and knotted, and prone to warp and easy splintering). Ash is good, hence its historical use as the wood for tool handles, spear handles etc, but latitudinally, it's crush resistance is better than its impact resistance, and oak is in fact better for impact resistance, so oak is better for bo/nunchaku. Oak refers to over 170 species. Some of these are great, some not so. Your local timber dealer should be able to point you in the right direction of some good stuff if you're anywhere in North America/Europe. In N Am, you should be after Quercus rubra or Q. alba, red or white oak, in Europe Q. robur English Oak or Q. petraea (sp?! it's been a long time!) - Sessile Oak. In world markets for timber I think it's always worth buying local for various reasons... Japanese oaks are supposedly very good, but what is often marketed as Japanese oak is often illegally cropped plantation-grown teak of some kind or cheap and flawed Tasmanian or Thai oak. Ironwoods again refer to many different trees and even from different families. But North American Ironwood is great (a turner friend of mine made a bokuto out of one of the ironwoods) but very expensive, especially if correctly dried, and a little too heavy for safe practise against other woods (plus it tends to cause a lot of damage to them!) and it'll possibly damage your rotator cuffs and elbows if you're swinging it about a lot and your form isn't good (ie, if you haven't spent hours doing it properly with a more reasonable weight). Cherries are very resilient and often a very nice colour (my turner friend made a bokuto from cherry too). Depending on your area they can be a bit expensive though. Don't know much about waxwood, which is the traditional wood for Chinese staffs, but I did read on a forum once that it's too whippy for bokuto, which would make sense, and therefore isn't so good for bo in Japanese arts. Sorry, got a bit long, but to sum up, as others have said, ash, oak, hickory, and some maples are good.
We have a type of ironwood here in the pacific area that is so hard we can't hardly even use it for small fires.
