mike kozelsky

In another life, i was a student of martial arts.  I ended up with a lot of souvenirs from that experience.  Among the more notable items are a pair of nunchucks, sais, and tonfa; as well as a variety of belts and, of course, a cliché headband.  I’ve wanted to do something with them for a while, but only recently figured out what to do.

I wanted to be super cheap about it, so i found a sheet of half inch plywood that i had in my basement.  I cut it to be 2’ x 4’ and then put loads of varnish on it.  I ended up putting on 3 or 4 coats of semi gloss polyurethane, then 3 coats of gloss wipe on poly (because that’s what i had laying around).  That took the majority of the time for this project – sanding, wiping with a tack rag, applying the next coat, and then letting it dry for at least a day.  I then wouldn’t come back for the next coat until i got around to it days or weeks later.  So this board spent a lot of time just taking up space on my basement workbench.

With the last coat applied, i was ready to place the items on it.  I just used some strategically placed small nails to hold up the weapons.  I put the tonfa near the top, framing where the belts would go.  Then the sais were near the bottom, crossed in the required manner, with the nunchucks on either side.

Then i didn’t quite know how to hold the belts in place.  After some random google searches for different types of hooks, i found that there’s something called shoulder hooks that would probably work.  I didn’t understand the dimensions from the descriptions, so i just drove to home depot and checked if they had them there.  They only had 3 sizes, but one of them was what i needed.  I bought a bunch of them, and it only cost 10$.  Each belts is 1.75” thick, so i put 2” of space in between the hooks and each belt is spaced 0.5” apart.

It was then time to affix the headband near the top of the board.  For this, i used some safety pins to hold the headband at a specific circumference.  Then i flattened it out and laid it on the board.  In the four corners, i drilled a little hold and put a zip tie through the middle of the headband and around the back.

I had some hardware that is intended to go on the back of paintings or mirrors for hanging on the wall.  I put those on the back and then was able to put it up on the wall.

It didn’t look quite right – it was too tall and there was too much vertical space between the weapons.  I brought it back to the basement and trimmed off 4.5” from the bottom.  Then i had to move up the nails for the weapons on the bottom.  Finally, i applied a one last quick coat of wipe on poly on the freshly cut bottom edge.

A few hours later, i put all the items back in place and hung it on the wall in my office.  I think it came out looking, as my dad would say, sharp.