2012-09-27 20:23:00
After last week's lecture on the importance of shinai maintenance you would think that people would actually take note. But no, sadly they don't. Last saturday I spent a good ten minutes inspecting and fixing one of our youngest members' shinai, despite having shown him how to do it and providing him with a printed booklet with instructions. He has two shinai at his disposal, the first one was in shreds and the latter was only a little bit splintered. So I took that one outside with my toolkit, also forbidding him to use the other one until it was fixed.
Sadly, many of the other members show only little more interest in maintenance. I have tried a number of ways to get them more involved, but without wanting to overstep my station I haven't had much success. The biggest "win" so far was when four of us had a great evening, doing maintenance on all of our equipment :) I'd love to repeat that sometime soon.
For now I'll do upkeep tonight, because I've got a tournament coming up! ( ^_^)
Sunday I'll be joining five other guys from Renshinjuku at the Fumetsu Cup tournament. I won't be in a team with them, as the Fumetsu Cup pits randomly selected teams against eachother. Who knows who'll be your teammate?! :D Of course, if I want to compete my shinai need to be in tiptop condition.
Last tuesday we had mandatory inspection at Renshinjuku Amstelveen and one of my shinai was sent back because of a tiny, beginning splinter. A quick repair later it was accepted, but I'll definitely go over both shinai with a fine toothed comb :) Ironically the shinai I loaned to Jeroen-sempai had no issues in QA.
kilala.nl tags: kendo, sports,
View or add comments (curr. 0)
All content, with exception of "borrowed" blogpost images, or unless otherwise indicated, is copyright of Tess Sluijter. The character Kilala the cat-demon is copyright of Rumiko Takahashi and used here without permission.