Cold Steel bokken tsuba

thingiverse

A spare tsuba (handguard) designed for the Cold Steel Bokken. Original one was 6 mm thick and made from injection-molded PP with a very high GF (glass fiber) content. Being wear resistant, very stiff and relatively impact resistant, this material turned out to be prone to fatigue cracking if the bokken is used for sparring. I've designed a simple and functional replacement 8 mm thick tsuba that is comparably strong when printed in PETG. It provides similar strength and impact resistance making it suitable for sparring. The downsides of PETG compared to PP-GF are low wear resistance (insignificant in this use case), higher deflection (also insignificant given the part thickness) and higher weight. Actually, it can be printed in any high impact plastic like glass-filled Nylon or PP-GF. The wide outer chamfer makes it possible to easily scale the part thickness within a slicer software down to around 4 mm and still get a non-traumatic chamfered edge.