Fighting Irons

[Ian]

Originally Posted by Jim McDougall

That looks pretty scary Andrew! reminds me of nimchuks and all the Bruce Lee movies I ever saw. Those type weapons have always amazed me, and seem like in the hands of anyone not tenaciously trained with them, would be even more dangerous to the user than the opponent.
I know I have trouble wrapping up an extension cord so the dynamics of these completely escape me!

Jim:

You are very much on target with your comment about how difficult a hinged weapon like this would be to use effectively (and without doing serious damage to yourself.

A scientific model for this is the complex pendulum. The double pendulum, the simplest version of these, shows chaotic behavior when subjected to simple to-and-fro movement. As always, there is a Wikipedia entry (here: double pendulum) that describes this in some detail, and provides several animated giffs to illustrate the predicted motion of a double pendulum when the two arms are of equal length and mass. This is probably more than you want to know about the mechanics of these weapons. Suffice to say that their already chaotic behavior is made more complicated when the length and mass of each arm differ, when the number of arms increases, and when the arms can move in more than one plane.

The weapon that Andrew shows would be extremely difficult to master--it has three hinges, the arms are of unequal length, and the weight distribution is not uniform. Its behavior when swung would be very challenging to reproduce and therefore not especially useful as a weapon. There is a good chance that the one wielding it would be impaled with his own weapon. I doubt that these were ever widely used or very popular.

Ian