Equipment

It happened. Then it happened again.

Lockdown during the COVID19 outbreak meant that like many other people, I was reduced to doing budo training at home and, as this started in the very early spring of 2020 when the weather was pretty awful, this meant training on the front room floor. It's not until you try training indoors that you realise how much room you use up when doing even relatively compact kata. So a couple of weeks in, while doing Ushiro, the end of my scabbard (the kojiri) hit the plant pot near where I was sitting at the moment of trying to complete the turn. My saya was jammed but my right hand and arm were intent on doing the draw. There was an audible crack and I realised that I had cracked open my koiguchi. I discarded this sword and went onto use "ahem" another person's sword that had been left at my house.

You would think that I would be smart enough to not repeat the same mistake but, sure enough, about three weeks later exactly the same thing happened. I now had two swords with broken saya. If we weren't in a lockdown condition then I would have asked my professional word-working friend to do the repair for me but naturally I couldn't do that and I decided that I would take up the process of doing proper saya repairs.

Jock Hopson Sensei had thankfully "donated" to me a whole ray skin (so called "samegawa" which I will write like this so it is not confused with the English word "same") quite some time ago, almost certainly when I had broken a different saya (I am quite good at this). Considering that I was going to be repairing Al Colebourn's saya as well though I decided that I should get in some practice first by trying to make a samegawa sleeve onto a bokuto. I found an old bokuto and started by marking out a narrow sleeve about 15mm wide around it. I then started using a combination of chisels, files and sandpaper to remove enough material that I could snugly fit a strip of samegawa around it so that it would be almost flush with the surface of the bokuto. It was at this point that I realised that I had not yet cut the strip of samegawa and attempted to do so with a pair of scissors. This turned out to be an error. The dimples on samegawa are basically bone and scissors are not the best instruments for cutting through bone. I therefore ended up with a strip of samekawa with not quite straight edges and a channel in the bokuto which wasn't exactly the same shape as the strip. I went ahead and used superglue to fix the samegawa in place. I did this in a couple of goes, first glueing one end in place ensuring that it was straight and waiting for that to dry. I then glued about 80% of the remaining skin and left a loose end. Once that had dried I did the final stretching gluing down using some tiny scraps to fill in the gap.