Breaking point

thin hickory rippings

Hickory woods are often regarded as some of the toughest and most resistant to breaking. Consequently,  hickory has long been the material of choice for hammer shafts and pick handles.  The one that I use for wooden swords is a pignut hickory. It is so resistant to breaking, that thin laths can be rolled up into tight curls.

In fact, it is so tough that it's almost impossible to snap or tear the thin rippings that come from the circular saw. When waste wood is this thin, I usually snap it into short lengths by hand.......but I can't do that with the hickory. I have to cut it all up with a saw!!!!!!

Sword saw

Chinese woodworker's home-made saw,  fitted up to look like a sword. Hardwood and brown lacquer.

 
Blade length is 375mm [14.75"] long,  the hilt is 204mm [8"] long, and the grip length is 102mm [4.25"].  Narrow blades like this are usually employed for cutting holes in wood rather than for cutting boards to dimensions.

The blade is fairly thick and has coarse, hand-cut teeth:

This is a nice example of the inventiveness of Chinese woodworkers. Woodworking tools were often decorated but his one is playful to the point of being humorous.

The decoration isn't perhaps what one would expect to see on a sword hilt, but it probably had some significance to the maker. The pommel is embellished with a bamboo motif, and the mask-head on the guard appears to be of a monkey in the clouds.

Slightly different on the other side:

Could this be the legendary Monkey King?

Chinese 'Sword Dancer'

Chinese martial artist, possibly a street entertainer

A question of length

Very close to the heart of every woodworker are the problems of measurement, accuracy and reproduction. When designing, I spend much of my time transferring measurements from one drawing to another using marks on a strip of paper. This is not just an accurate way of transferring data but this

method makes it easy to repeat the procedure without having to remember any figures.  In the workshop, I generally use a length of wood marked out with a knife. A knife cut is thinner than a pencil line and is therefore more accurate.

As useful as this method is, it really only works within the confines of one workshop. If you want to share measurements with others over distance or time, then it is more convenient to have standardised units of length. The Chinese unit of measurement was the chi, commonly referred to as the 'Chinese foot'. Unlike the Imperial foot which is divided into 12 inches, the chi was a metric system, divided into ten units; .

One foot rules - Chinese horn, Chinese bamboo, English boxwood

Despite standardisation, the Chinese chi was somewhat variable in length. According to the author Louise Levathes*:

"....the official length of the chi, or Chinese foot, varied considerably throughout the Ming Dynasty, from 9.5 inches to over 13 inches. Moreover, the chi varied depending on what it was being used to construct and where it was being used......"

Of course this variability does present some irritating difficulties for anyone trying to interpret measurements mentioned in old Chinese texts!

Comparative lengths of Chinese rules

I have two Chinese rules [see above pics]: one made of horn that is of a significant age, and one made of bamboo. The bamboo one is newer, and was made some time during the last century. The 'brass' dots on the horn example are surprisingly free from tarnish and so are probably a low quality gold. The divisions are not entirely uniform along the length and also,  the rules are twisted and bent. It would have been quite difficult to do very accurate work with these, so perhaps they were intended to be used more as a rough guide. 

I imagine that whatever measuring methods were employed by the Chinese craftsmen of old, they would still have used the woodworker's maxim:

"Measure twice and cut once!"

  

* 'When China Ruled the Seas' - by Louise Levathes - Oxford University Press

Chinese longsword

Recently, I was commissioned by Jack Chen of http://www.chineselongsword.com/  to produce a wooden changdao for video demonstration purposes.

……..as described in the ancient swordsmanship manual :

 Dan Dao Fa Xuan  by  Cheng Zong You

Book cover

and translated by Jack Chen: http://www.chineselongsword.com/translation.shtml

Jack Chen demonstrating the Chinese longsword

It was important that the wooden sword looked like the original Ming Dynasty sword, handled like the original sword and was also suitable for contact use.

Overall length : 1400mm  [55”]

Grip length :  400mm [15 ¾”]

Weight : 900g [2 lbs]

Materials:

               Blade/handle : white oak

               Guard: high impact, engineering grade polymer, 8mm thick

               Ferrule : brass

               Pommel : brass

               Grip wrap : black cotton 

              Finish : hard oil finish, containing tung oil

Changdao with traditional Chinese gripwrap

As stated in Dan Dao Fa Xuan, the ChangDao had a faceted blade with a distinct medial ridge. this was a similar design to Japanese blades........consequently, the blade of this wooden ChangDao has a similar cross section to that of a bokken.

The excellent video demonstration by Jack Chen can be seen on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1Vg4O7g9js