Straight sword

[norther practitioner]

I am looking for a straight sword for a child, I was wondering if anyone knew where to get a short straight sword, I have looked numerous places, and the shortest I could find is one with a 26" blade, I am looking for something more like 20"-22" or so. Any help is much appreciated!

[ewallace]

You may want to try a local flea market aka: swap meet. I have seen them around, although the quality is probably fairly poor.

[Aramus]

E-bay.com They have a lot of stuff. You can look under:
Sporting good: Martial arts and then do your search.

There a few other aution sites, did you check Martialartsmart.com?

Good luck

[GeneChing]

I think the smallest we carry is a 28 - http://store.yahoo.com/martialartsmart/45-56wu28.html . You can get smaller blades in China, but there is such a small market for them hear, I don't know if anyone bothers to bring them over. I'd recommend you get a wushu steel blade and just cut it down to size. It's such a light steel that you can trim it with tin snips then file off the rough edges.

Aramus - thanks fo the plug. PM me your postal address.

[norther practitioner]

Thanks for the suggestions guys.
Gene, thanks I've noticed.....

[BrentCarey]

I am now teaching my own son the jian, so I understand. I believe we found a sub-$50 24" spring steel sword. I don't recall where off the top of my head.

Three things:

Like Gene said, wushu steel is easy enough to trim down, but it's important to consider that the child will outgrow any sword pretty quickly.

Wooden swords are much less expensive and easy to shorten. The nice thing about wood is that it responds more like combat steel if the child will eventually train with combat steel. Wushu steel will do things that a rigid blade will not.

I went to Home Depot and picked up a dowel for $3-4 and cut it to length. This is really the ideal training weapon for a child. One nice benefit (aside from the price) is the fact that a dowel is slightly harder to hold onto than a sword. It forces the wielder to have a firm grip, yet a supple wrist.

I hope this helps.

-Brent

[norther practitioner]

Thanks Bret,
The only thing is it is supposed to be a present, we took the out growing thing into perspective by looking for this size blade, but 24" sounds like it could work, thanks for the advice on options, I agree 100%. I practiced with a dowel for a while for that exact reason, now i have a very heavy blade to practice with, its nice when I demo and use a normally weighted steel blade.