Ow, ow,
OW! Although the above writeup has a good basic set of information, for the love of any body parts you have, please dont use
dowels! Dowels are very very prone to
shatter--or even worse
splinter--when hit hard.
Rattan is the best, if not only, sword-making material. Basically a cousin of
bamboo but solid all the way through, it has its grain running along the
length of the piece and is very very
dense, making it nearly shatter-proof. (But remember, a hard enough
blow will shatter nearly anything.) Much "wicker" and
patio furniture is made out of rattan, but the stuff is fairly hard to find uncut. Some hardware stores carry it. If you can't find it locally, look online with keywords '
SCA' '
rattan' and possibly if you have no work 'raw' or 'uncut' rattan.
In terms of construction... a lot of SCAidans use pure rattan as their blades. But more and more of late, a good number are using a retan core and coating it with rubber/plastic tubing, some bastardized half-cousin to pvc pipe but much less brittle.
For the 'traditional' sword where one does not use this "sheath" outside the retan, there is another way to make it less shatter-proof. Coat the sucker with heavy-duty strapping tape. Not packing tape, *strapping* tape. The stuff with all the funny stringy little 'cords' running thru it? Yeah, that stuff. Wrap the entire blade up and down, wrapping around the blade at least once from bottom to top, if not back up agian. This helps stabelize the wood a little bit, absorbs a bit of the blow, and most importantly, if the wood *does* break, the stickiness and strings will hold it together so half of it doesn't go flying across the room and thwack someone, or send splinters and small wood chuncks flying. After this is done, *then* coat the sucker with duct tape.