Soo Ma Tai wrote:As far as our rules go, that weapon would be perfectly legal. I made a pole arm with a 10" or so section of haft padding in the center of two 9" grip areas to increase the spread between my hands for more leverage. That weapon passed at CW no probs. Changing the fulcrum of the weapon can be beneficial for a user with smaller stature, making the weapon more balanced and easier to swing and control.
You wanted to be able to fight with 18" separating your hands (generously giving you 5" hands)? I just grabbed a nearby core and tried that; ridiculous at the length I picked up (46"). Sounds not entirely unreasonable, though, for long pole fighting. If your pole is seven feet long or longer, you can have 28" of handle legally; that's fine. If you want to pad some of that handle section, even in the middle of it, separating the sections, that's just extra nice of you. But, if you had a 6' polearm and were trying to put a 28" handle on it and then pad part of the interior of the handle in order to make it not illegal, well, I think that's against the spirit of Rule 1.4.2.3, which I perceive to be a rule limiting how far up on your weapon (by ratio) your core can be unpadded. I would fail such a weapon.
Soo Ma Tai wrote:I can make a sword with 18" of unpadded handle and 12" of striking surface, no haft padding and it's legal.
Except it's not:
BoW wrote:1.4.1.4. The maximum handle length for a Class 1 Weapon is eighteen (18) inches or one-third (1/3) of the overall length, whichever is greater. This cannot exceed one-half (1/2) of the overall length.
Emphasis mine.
I really don't think that blues should be allowed to have handle up to half the length of the weapon. It's excessive and I can't count the number of times I've blocked somebody's long-handle blue and gotten cracked across the knuckles with unpadded core. But that's another issue.
Soo Ma Tai wrote:I see no difference between the two as far as safety goes. In fact, why would that be any more or less safe than a q-staff made to our rules?
Quarterstaves have to pass striking levels of padding each end, so it's harder to build a Q-stick with easily-gripped padding for the rear hand. Being that the incidental padding under a handle area would only be subject to the rule requiring that core not be felt through the incidental padding on a Non-Striking Surface, you could easily cover that area with one layer of 4# foam and be in the clear. Now you've basically extended your unpadded handle farther up the length of your weapon.
It's one of those things where our gear is supposed to be safe for anybody to use. If someone builds that weapon I just drew and never uses it from anywhere but the handle and never ever hits someone with the handle, great! But if they drop it on the field and someone else scoops it up and decides they want the extra reach and starts swinging it with one hand on the pommel and one hand just above the top of the lower haft padding, that's a LOT of handle flying around halfway up the length of a long swung weapon, the very situation rules like 1.4.2.3 were designed to prevent. If it were supposed to be okay to have that much handle that far up a swung weapon, the rules for handle length for reds and blues would be the same as for green-only weapons.