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John Stanley
On how to make a shillelagh (traditional Irish walking/fighting stick):
It’s rather difficult. The process of making it takes between three and five years. So, once wood is cut — we harvest in the winter time, we’re doing it at the moment — and when it’s harvested, it’s brought in and air-dried for about a month. We then machine-trim the extremities of the wood, the edges, make a fine cut, and we seal that with a petroleum wax that’s heated. That’s sucked up and absorbed into the pores and gives a very good seal. And what that does then is it slows down the seasoning process of the wood, and it allows the entire length of wood to dry evenly through the bark. Then we open the seals in about a year’s time, and we can assess, by examining the extremity, the moisture content of the entire piece of wood throughout. So that we then determine what’s to be done with it in the second year. Usually, if it’s a fighting stick to be used as a weapon, we’ll apply copious amounts of boiled linseed oil, a good absorbing oil, to the extremities, and we keep applying that until absorption slows and stops. We then reseal the wood and allow that to continue to dry for another year. While it’s drying, the moisture that’s being released is being replaced by the oil being sucked through the capillaries. So, what you end up with in a fighting stick situation is a stick that has a moisture content. We don’t allow it to dry out fully, so that you get a stick that has a sort of a built-in shock absorber, it takes the sting out of it when you hit something, so you don’t get a sting or a shock up your arm. Sticks that are to be used for walking sticks are treated differently after the first year. They would continue to be air-dried, and we encourage them to continue drying until all the moisture practically is removed. That way, the walking stick shaft is lighter and it’s much more rigid. So, that even quite a light stick won’t bend when you put weight on it, and it also helps create the balance then that we achieve in the walking stick, which is a balanced stick, that they move naturally in a person’s normal motion.