I have never seen this, though clearly it is possible.
There are a few places where the artist has commented that he generally uses a thin shinogi zukuri blade – a blade that is basically dead flat planes meeting at the edge.
That is important because it means the blade is thin and there is no flat behind the bevel – it’s a weapon designed for show-cutting more than combat. (On the other hand, if you can move fast enough and score a killing cut without having to smash through armor, who cares, right?) I am not critiquing him, I am not in his league at all. I believe somewhere he mentioned that the blade in his practical katana is basically a piece of sharpened flat-beveled W-2 tool steel, which would definitely make sense.
This would be impossible with a blade with a pronounced shinogi, since the secondary angle would kick the target apart as it went through. This is just some beautiful practice. A lot of practice.
Something I haven’t seen before:
Maryland diner turns leftover bacon grease into soap to save money
What a great idea. He probably had to pay to dispose of it, and now people will pay extra for anything bacon-related.
Ha ha!~ McDonald’s Big Mac scented soap it is next!
So the blade has a triangular cross section?
Wouldnt’t that make the blade extremely flexible out-of-plane?
Imagine hitting something slightly off-angle.
Something I don’t want to see again:
Stable Diffusion 3 mangles human bodies due to nudity filters
Is that not like the sword in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon? (I always wondered how effective something so wobbly could actually be.)
rsmith@#3:
So the blade has a triangular cross section?
Wouldnt’t that make the blade extremely flexible out-of-plane?
Imagine hitting something slightly off-angle.
It’s worse than that! Typically if you are blocking another katana, you want to take the impact on the side or back, not the cutting edge. So it might not survive a block from a heavier thicker blade.
As you say, it’d also be more flexible out-of-plane, but the whole point of tameshigiri is that you want your cut to be at an exact angle where the angle of the edge matches the angle of the motion, otherwise it can swoop in the material as it cuts, which means its more likely to not cut, and stick in the material. If you’re hitting bone and it swoops, there’s a good chance that a chunk will snap out of the cutting edge, especially if your blade is thinner.
I’m not criticizing sword-guy, he’s really good (sometimes a bit too flashy) but he’s using a blade that is optimized for a specific purpose and wouldn’t be as good if you were fighting unless you were confident that you were so much more skilled than your opponent that you’d hit them before they could get a blade out and block.
xohjoh2n@#5:
Is that not like the sword in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon? (I always wondered how effective something so wobbly could actually be.)
Soooooo….. A lot of Wushu practitioners swear by their art form and many of them would disagree strongly with what I am about to say.
I actually own a Wushu sword (2 or so, actually) that I bought to use as a prop when I was shooting stock photography for deviantart. (e.g.: [deviantart]) and my conclusion is that the things are useless. Chinese military history is full of functional swords, but those goofy Wushu things are not them. I discussed this with a Kung Fu guy, once, who insisted that the entire trick is to drive the sword so perfectly and straight that the entire momentum of the blade is perfectly aligned and then it can go through anything. I suppose if one practiced for a very long time, one could do some coolish tricks in that vein, but I don’t think it’d be plausible to be maneuvering against an active opponent with a wobbly steel spaghetti, since any angular force makes the thing boing around in a most disturbing manner. They are also quite thin. So that I don’t come across as a katana nazi, imagine a fight with a Wushu sword against a swept-hilt musketeer-style rapier. OK, that was quick. A beat attack, the Wushu sword pretzels, and bam, the poor Wushu guy has 12 inches of steel through their chest. By the way, a rapier is designed to be stiff enough to poke straight through a victim without your having to work hard to set up a perfect attack. Swish-click-bam you are dead. The worst scenario I can imagine would be Wushu guy against a 17th century smallsword – those are the things rapiers evolved into, a stiff triangular blade that is designed for beat attack and thrust, is very light and balanced, and strong enough to block a slash or stab from just about anything. I’m not much of a swordsman (USFA D rated in epee back around 1992) but I’d only want to go up against an experienced smallsword user with a .308 rifle and 500+ yards of open ground between us.
I’m noodling around here, but I’d say the back (mune) of a typical katana is around 6mm and slightly thinner toward the tip. I’m guessing that his amazing +5 sword of mat cutting might be 5mm or something like that, probably monosteel. If I was going to make one (suddenly realizing that I could) I’d take a 1/4 piece of W-2 and get the curvature by differentially tempering it, then grind it in 2 flat planes.
This chart has been around forever:
So the blade I am talking about would be a “shinogi zukuri” (lower most left) without a shinogi-ji (the flat above the cutting edge) You can see in the shinogi zukuri cross-section that the blade bevels are curved – that’s an important feature of a Japanese combat weapon – the extra metal behind the edge helps support and strengthen it so the edge will resist angular forces slightly better. Of course, that curve is going to offer slight drag in cutting – a blade with dead flat bevels would cut better but you’re getting a bit thin and you’d better just be so lightning fast you kill your target before they can throw out a block, because a thin blade could potentially be cut by a heavier blade wielded by an expert.
I just remembered Walter Sorrels was talking about this issue, once and said that if he wanted to make a “cheater tameshigiri sword” he’d do a hollow grind. Yipe! Imagine a 3 foot long straight razor!
All this is making me think I should get a rifle rack for the back of my pickup truck and keep my smallsword in it. Before I wrecked my unfortunate Chevy S-10, I had a rifle rack in the back, with a cricket bat. It also had big stickers on the doors announcing that it was a “zombie response vehicle” and little zombie kill skeletons down the left front quarter panel… Ah, youth.
Reginald Selkirk@#4:
Stable Diffusion 3 mangles human bodies due to nudity filters
Oh, yes. Everyone knew that was coming. You can’t do a “muscular guy lying on the beach” without a lot of body references.
This suddenly makes me wish I had the time to waste training a checkpoint (it is a huge amount of work and CPU time) I’d train one that only knew how to do people in full burqua or desert robes and turbans.
I do think there are interesting problems surrounding AI art and erotica, but I haven’t tried to formulate my opinion enough to write it down and I don’t know if anyone would care, anyway. Usually, my “go to” thought on this matter is that the US has a huge problem with its fear of healthy sexuality, which mostly manifests as a promotion of massive graphic violence in media. Hey, people are gonna get their arousal fix somehow, right? It’s not simply an issue of American prudery, it’s actually a threat to people’s well-being, but I’m gonna just chalk that up to christianity. I’ll observe that the ancient world generally had a pretty realistic (not necessarily nice) attitude toward sexuality, but the christians really fucked that up. Buncha creepy perverts, the lot.
In [stderr] I posted this video of a tameshigiri cut gone slightly off
https://youtu.be/I3qQAxS2q7w
OOI, how far can a smallsword user run in the time it takes to load, aim and fire a .308 rifle twice?
OOI, how far can a smallsword user run in the time it takes to load, aim and fire a .308 rifle twice?
Not very!
I once had a funny conversation in Dealy Plaza, Dallas, a few years ago. The place has these conspiracy nuts with signs stating “facts” and “evidence” and one of them had a sign that said “nobody can fire 3 aimed shots in 12 seconds with a bolt action rifle and hit anything!”
Me: “that’s an interesting claim. you do know that Oswald was a marine corps trained marksman?”
Him: “it’s still impossible!”
Me: “how many times do you have to work the bolt on a bolt-action rifle to fire 3 shots?”
Him: “three”
Me: “thanks for playing.”
The correct answer is 2. BANG whicka-clicka BANG whicka-clicka BANG
By the way, I reenacted Oswald’s shot, out of curiousity, at three times the distance and fired 3 rounds in 3 seconds and hit my target through the throat once and the head twice. And I was rusty, at that time.
I did a long meandering post on the topic, which I ought to review and post here, but I’m not sure I’m a gun nut anymore. ;)
[The reason I did it at 3 times the distance was because I forget the exact numbers but everyone was all excited about Oswald’s shot and I got the number 130 or whatever it was stuck in my head and assumed that it had to be 130 yards because 130 feet is a handgun shot not a shot for a scoped rifle. So I did my reenactment at 130 yards or whatever I thought it was when Oswald’s actual shot was feet. By the way, Dealy Plaza is tiny!! The idea that there was someone on the “grassy knoll” with a scoped rifle is absurd – people would have been standing so close in front of him they’d have felt the muzzle blast! Really! You could throw a grenade from the “grassy knoll” and have a better hit rate. A professionally run ‘hit’ would have been done with something like a semiautomatic M-1 Garand and a 20 round clip and just blasted everyone in the limo into paste.]
“The first Mad Minute record was set by Sergeant Major Jesse Wallingford in 1908, scoring 36 hits on a 48-inch target at 300 yards (4.5 mils/ 15.3 moa).[1]” (Wikipedia)
That’s in a minute, with a lee enfield rifle that needed reloading too. So that’s <2 seconds per shot, and a longer distance (i aint dealing with your feets and yards BS, we invented meters for a reason! rhubarb rhubarb)
"I do think there are interesting problems surrounding AI art and erotica, but I haven’t tried to formulate my opinion enough to write it down and I don’t know if anyone would care, anyway. "
I definitely have thoughts about the sexualisation of women's bodies and misogyny in terms of image generation software. As my previous comments show :P
That is some very impressive show cutting!
“Imagine a 3 foot long straight razor!”
I am now! i wonder if it would still be considered a sword by the cops since it’s obviously impractical as a combat weapon?
I mean, someone with that much skill/control, wouldn’t need the specialized weapon to slice someone’s throat (only) in combat. They could probably smash through the same throat with a random piece of 1/4″ threaded rod, nevermind still use the sturdier/more versatile weapon…
That would make a lot of sense, as a training weapon. A small margin for error would highlight any misalignment and make you very aware of keeping the blade straight. And then you’d get out the real sword for the actual fight.
I don’t know anything about swords, but in unarmed martial arts, there are a lot of positions and movements that exist only as exercises to train certain habits, not as something you’d do in a real fight. It would make sense to have the same for weapons training.
It is an impressive show of skill no matter the blade used. He had to have a perfect edge alignment for this to happen. I have watched some tatami cutting vids in the past and I do not remember seeing this happen either.
I never cut tatami (or is it a rice-straw bundle?) but I did have a milk carton top stay atop the bottom after being cut with a machete with a beveled grind. Although that was an accident it did not stay perfectly aligned as in this guy’s case. He can replicate it reliably and that is truly impressive.
Building a Gun that Never Misses with ZeroMark’s Joel Anderson
“Never misses” – let’s grant him some leniency on target size, etc.
That’s a fantasy. Back in 1744 Euler derived a formula for buckling of slender colums. And that formula is a best case. It presupposes a homogeneous material, a uniform cross section over the whole length, a purely axial load and a perfectly straight part. Given the Young’s modulus of the material, the (smallest) second area moment of the cross section, the nature of the loading and the length of the column there is a force above which the column (or sword) will buckle. Even if you drive it perfectly straight.
… enjoyed the juxtaposition of this and last post: first attempting to attain a plate of zero curvature, this discussing an edge, an elegant curve and flatness of a blade. Where might we find the most extreme negative (saddle) curvature, and is it also elegant?
astringer@#20:
Where might we find the most extreme negative (saddle) curvature, and is it also elegant?
I don’t know “most extreme” but I can tell you elegant. Take a look at some Grozer Hungarian recurve bows. [grozer]
A Japanese “Yu” bow is also pretty beautiful but I think the recurve bows are better bows (sacrilege!) and are more beautiful (double!)
By the way, in formulating this comment-response I thought of a fun sort of Taoist riddle: The bow is the only weapon where what is not there is the most important part. I almost responded with that as a challenge, do you think you’d have known the answer?
Grozer Assyrian composite bow. Cheaper than an AR-15 and a damn sight better looking.