Walsall Karate was established in 1996 and opened a full time dojo a few years ago. They have worked long and hard to create a high quality environment, that would reflect the quality of the club and provide the best opportunity for its members to flourish.
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| graphic design for Walsall Karate Dojo |
With all his building work completed and his club well established in the community Steve Carless Sensei was looking to make further investments in his dojo.
One of his criteria was a nafudakake that could accommodate further growth and development.
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| The yudansha nafudakake |
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| and there is more .... |
Steve wanted to commission a nafudakake for his dan grades, but wanted to explore what he could do for his kyu and mon grades.
As with most clubs, junior grades will come and go and he wanted to recognise the significant achievement that the yudansha had made.
At Sotos Sabisu all our nafuda are made from quality hardwoods, in this case cherry and maple, the kanji and katakana are high resolution images produced in our graphic design package.
Steve had a local resource that could make up pine nafuda and varnish them, to which he planned to add their names in normal text. On promotion to Shodan, the club will have Soto Sabisu produce a hardwood nafuda with kana to match their certificate and this will then be inserted in the yudansha kake.
He also wanted to maximise the space available, so we suggested "stacking" frames one above the other. Steve wanted to try and keep all the framing material as small as possible so it was similar to the Dan grade certificates on the rear wall of the dojo.
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| Layout of both kake at the dojo entrance. |
Rather than "stacking the frames we milled the standard section to accommodate a large rebate above the nafuda and a smaller rebate at the base of the nafuda so they can be removed and re-positioned after gradings. The challenge meant building a kake nearly 3m long and 1.6m high but with tolerances of +/- 0.5mm. What we suggested is that Soto Sabisu produce the kake and the grade nafuda and Walsall Karate produce the student nafuda, ensuring costs were kept at an affordable level.
Walsall karate dojo has over 250 members and requested room for expansion. They supplied the wall dimensions available and we made the kake just under size. The kake can hold just over 350 nafuda so they should be ok for a while.
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| grade nafuda by Soto Sabisu in Cherry and name nafuda by Walsall karate in pine |
I think the end result looks brilliant, a great solution to the challenges that we had discussed. Steve has both kyu and mon grades and seeing as he had some spare space now he wanted t add his ungraded students, so they too felt part of the dojo. There are a couple of transitional grades from mon to kyu and Steve wanted to reflect this as well. We customised the grade nafuda to his dojo's requirements.
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| graphic design of Walsall's dan, kyu, transitional, mon and Mu nafuda |
Both kake were too large to transport in a single piece so were transported to the dojo and made up on site. If required we can produce plans for the kake to be made locally, this may well be an important factor if considering for export.
Below is our current costings for nafuda:
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