James,

I had an interesting video pop up in my feed of a guy making a set of brass knuckles out of wood.

This caused me to wonder, rather than looping each finger, would an oval ring surrounding all four fingers be better?

Better for the fingers & hand that is, I doubt it would hit harder.

I have read articles cautioning against the use of a climbing carabiner as it rotates in the hand, but I'm thinking of a custom product that fits fairly well.

Your thoughts?

Thanks,

Don Quotays

The carabiner is useless. I've tried it. Knuckledusters are designed as the most obvious case of intent to do harm amongst any weapon. So, I would avoid them. They work not by covering the knuckles with hardness—though this helps—but by bracing the base of the weapon through which the fingers insert and wrap, against the palm.

So, just hit them with your palm.

If you are outnumbered or outgunned, use a pipe or bar that is about 8 inches long, preferably a threaded pipe that will not slide. PVC works for this as well as wood, though threaded iron is the best. Stab inward and lateral hammer-fist outward. I once demonstrated this on a video done by Dennis Dale who has since ghosted me and taken the video down.

[For the rest my comments are in brackets.]

Weapons without metal

Sun, Feb 21, 4:58 PM (19 hours ago)

James.

At the very tail end of this video is a wooden version of brass knuckles with embedded shark's teeth.

Pure coincidence I saw it after sending the earlier question.

Thanks,

Don Quotays

[Don, all you need of a weapon is something hard that can be made to move fast. Thanks for the nice video. I will always favor weapons that are also tools with a commonly understood non-combat purpose, up until the final collapse of civilization. Understand, that we are now in a zombie apocalypse movie, with the key difference, that if we—unlike actors—successfully defend against the zombies, we will be attacked by body-armored SWAT goons. The zombies and the pigs serve the same masters. So weapon selection should focus on portable deniability.]

A Machete Martial Arts Master Shares His Secrets

Sun, Feb 21, 6:36 PM (17 hours ago)

James,

This is not a recent video, dunno if you've seen it.

Kinda difficult for me to pick out useful techniques, but these guys are smooth.

But your advice to practice the stick as a machete counter is very reinforced by this.

-Don Quotays

[I viewed this before and now once again. The techniques shown are useful but stylized for safety and are essentially demos of methods used mostly at closer range than they would be in combat. The machete is a forestry machete, not the sugar cane machete used by the actual slaves who rose up. The history related here on the slave rebellion is poor at best. I would bet my left nut that his kids have already highly debased his art in order to appeal to hipster first-worlders. French troops kicked the shit out of the slave rebels and then died of yellow fever.]

Heartwarming

-Shep

[Shep, note that the knife attacker was beaten to death with a gun and not shot by a much older man. If he had shot the man he would be facing charges for murder. As usual, the committed use of a blunt extension weapon trumps the use of a knife employed from beyond grappling range.]

Can't think of an appropriate headline.

Shep

[Sir, Where Men Are Still Men, would be it. It is a shame that there is no greater crime on the world stage then a stone age brawl. If lazar beams had been used to liquidate the infant children of terrorists from outer space, that would be hailed as a great moral victory. But Dot-Heads and Chinks doing what the Americans and Canadians should be doing between Toronto and Detroit, is somehow an international pseudo-war crime. May the Gray God rise and smite sissy kind.]