My daughter is starting black belt training and needed a set of practice kamas.

I forged these out of 1095. The ferrules are copper and the handles are Padouk.

Very nice rockstar!

Those dont seem like practice ones they seem like the real deal!

Nice, those look real enough to me. Any comment from Sensei?

Frosty The Lucky.

Thanks Freddy and Frosty!  Dustin, they aren't sharpened and I drew the temper to a light blue so they wouldn't chip if they got dropped.  I spoke to the teachers beforehand and they assured me that they wouldn't be making contact with the kamas.  If it had been otherwise, I'd have her learn on wooden or foam props.

 

I didn't think you or they'd let student's spar with real weapons. I was just wondering what the Sensei thought of them.

It was funny, when I was practicing, the Japanese Sensei were all pretty level headed about American karate gear but the American students and Sensei were darned fanatically Japanese is best headed. Perception is a funny thing, objectivity can be very hard to maintain.

Frosty The Lucky.

Those came out great!

Frosty, the sensei had a look at them yesterday. The consensus is that they are good but "heavy". I noticed they were comparing them to aluminum and plastic trainers so it's a bit relative.

The set I once made for an instructor were heavy---full tanged all the way to the base of the handle; but it was what he specified and as he went out and chopped down an oak tree with them what he wanted.  I wonder how they lasted, he went to Okinawa to teach martial arts and so I don't know...(I suspect he was more in the mode of power vs subtlety)   As most of the one I have seen have a punched out sheet metal blade pretty much any hand forged blade will be heavier.

Thomas, that's interesting. It seems odd to me that they are teaching with kamas made of such flimsy stuff when the origin is so clearly an agricultural tool. That being said, teaching forms is their focus so subtlety takes precedence for them.

Scythe blades are often quite lightly made in western europe these days. As such tools are meant to be swung all day long lightness would be a virtue and not much to run into in a rice paddy.  However some of the "Martial Arts" versions I have seen are flimsy beyond belief.  I would think that using the agricultural version would be safer.

I have a nice vintage hedger (corn scythe) that looks a whole lot like this one:

Always though of it as the European version of a kama and assumed it was hand forged.  The blade is on the order of machete thickness and is stiff, fast and light.  Certainly not meant for chopping through oak (though it does limb shrubs easily), but still wouldn't want to get in the way of one swung in anger.

Thanks Stormcrow!

Thomas,

I was thinking more rice paddy when I wrote that, but you're making a good point.

Latticino,

Yours definitely has similarities to the images of historical Kama's I've seen.  Probably the biggest difference is the angle of the blade relative to the handle.  Kamas seem to be made more for a pulling towards you cut, than a sweeping out in front of you cut.

Most of the Kamas pictures I found show the tip in the same plane as the top of the ferrule. I don't know anything about harvesting rice but I've seen images of people in paddys holding bundles of cut stalks rather than gathering up previously cut stalks.

I've never had a chance to handle a "real" steel Kama so I'm not sure what kind of blade thickness they typically have.  I'm right around 1/8" which makes them pretty thick compared to most of the machetes I've seen.

I wouldn't want to be hit by one either.  They look almighty painful in their own right, but the prospect of getting cut and pulled towards a skilled opponent means things start bad and quickly get worse! 

 

If your daughter trains with heavier equipment, down the road when she does demo's she'll be able to fly with a lighter set.

boisdarc,

That's a good point.

On 7/7/2016 at 4:02 PM, rockstar.esq said:

Thanks Stormcrow!

Thomas,

I was thinking more rice paddy when I wrote that, but you're making a good point.

Latticino,

Yours definitely has similarities to the images of historical Kama's I've seen.  Probably the biggest difference is the angle of the blade relative to the handle.  Kamas seem to be made more for a pulling towards you cut, than a sweeping out in front of you cut.

Most of the Kamas pictures I found show the tip in the same plane as the top of the ferrule. I don't know anything about harvesting rice but I've seen images of people in paddys holding bundles of cut stalks rather than gathering up previously cut stalks.

I've never had a chance to handle a "real" steel Kama so I'm not sure what kind of blade thickness they typically have.  I'm right around 1/8" which makes them pretty thick compared to most of the machetes I've seen.

I wouldn't want to be hit by one either.  They look almighty painful in their own right, but the prospect of getting cut and pulled towards a skilled opponent means things start bad and quickly get worse! 

 

As I understand it, the harvesting method is to gather the standing stalks in the left hand, cut them at the base with the kama using a pulling (rather than sweeping) motion, and then laying the handful of stalks off the the side. The swath thus cleared will receive the cut grain from the adjacent strip. The end result is long rows of cut grain with the stalks all facing one way, ready to be gathered and bundled.

I know it's fiction and not documentary, but there's a good representation of this in the grain harvesting sequence in "The Seven Samurai".