For Those Who Make Their Own Wasters

[David Kite]

http://kingfisherwoodworks.com/hickoryhs.htm

http://www.kingfisherwoodworks.com/hickory.html

http://kingfisherwoodworks.com/warr.maint.html

I haven't yet looked into how to acquire this wood, but I'm interested in doing so. I'm tired of my wasters breaking, but if their findings are accurate, then this type of wood would seem to be a sound economic investment.

This information may only be useful to those of us who make our own weapons, since I don't know if these guys would be interested in making Western style weapons. Even if they were, their bokken are about $150US, so I couldn't imagine Western weapons being cheaper.

If anyone knows of a source for Appalachian hickory, I'd be willing to learn.

David Kite
GFS, ARMA in IN

[Jon Wolfe]

I found the Kingfisher site to be very insightful in the persuit of making wooden wasters as well but, I too ran into the wall of not being able to find a distributor the carries Appalachian Hickory as well. But then, when plastic wasters began to appear, I did a little web-searching and came across this website:

http://www.usplastic.com/catalog/category.asp?catalog_name=USPlastic&Category_Name=62&Page=1&clickid=topnav

Nylon is the stuff I've read that was to be used but, someone with the descretionary income to experiment with the other materials might find something better. (Just a thought, I'm not an engineer or have a knowledge of materials but, it's just a thought.)

I haven't ordered anything from them yet, I'm still practicing making wasters out of some dollar-a-foot Poplar (something I must advise to anyone who is going to be making their own; you WILL make a lot of mistakes in the beginning, especially if you have limited wood-working skills such as myself) but, this is definatley the kind of company that carries the right kind of material for plastic wasters.

[Ben Michels]

I live in southern Pennsylvania so I figured Hickory wouldn't be too hard to find around here. However, I exhausted (as far as I could tell anyway) every wood supply store within a reasonable distance trying to find the stuff. The best I found was hickory hardwood flooring.. which obviously won't work.