The Armour Archive

There is a rattan shortage for imports coming to the US. The prices we get charged for the rattan has gone up on us. We have to adjust but plan on absorbing much of this cost ourselves. The good news is that I our prices will go up to the price it was 20 years ago and no higher at this moment. We will try to keep this price down for all of you.

Cheers!

Ice

Rattan shortage = Move Pennsic to BotN and Team USA now numbers 1000 fighters?

Kidding!!

Steel ain't cheap either, since the Chinese are buying metric S-loads of it....

Oh-boy. The Chinese team at BotN will be 10,000 troops?

Yes, but using standard Chinese tactics, they will only have 500 swords among them.

Baron Alcyoneus wrote:Yes, but using standard Chinese tactics, they will only have 500 swords among them.

isnt that the russian tactic?

10000 Chines troupes, in CHINESE armor,,,,The tide will run red with blood.

So, we've pasted peak rattan!

Polypro for my swords it is then...

Avoid Polypro, bad stuff

Not in the East, not yet.

Christophe de Frisselle wrote:So, we've pasted peak rattan!

Polypro for my swords it is then...

The shortage has been coming for quite a while. It is neither a new or sudden thing.

Talk to anybody active in the SCA in the 70's and they will all know a guy who had a six inch piece of rattan and did such-and-such with it. Today, four inch pieces can't be found and three inch is horribly rare. For decades, rattan is being harvested younger and younger as demand grows and the forest doesn't.

Did that guy with the 6" rattan have a 200mpg carburetor, too?

I personally remember a post Duke Martin made about an experiment he performed using a 4" piece. I haven't been able to find a 4" thick piece of rattan since I started carving.

Yep, prices will be going up. I'll be posting when I actually change them. The other part of it, besides the heavy harvesting, is that the government of Malaysia wants to export finished products not raw rattan, so their duty structures and export limits are reflecting that.

Baron Eirik wrote:Yep, prices will be going up. I'll be posting when I actually change them. The other part of it, besides the heavy harvesting, is that the government of Malaysia wants to export finished products not raw rattan, so their duty structures and export limits are reflecting that.

Hmmm, what would it cost to have someone in Malaysia carve rattan waster blanks?

S~

Sean Powell wrote: Hmmm, what would it cost to have someone in Malaysia carve rattan waster blanks?

As far as I know, I'm the only guy in the world that wants that particular job.

i dont mind doing it but when someone else already has the practice down to a science you go with that guy.
i love thte possibilities of a 4" piece of rattan that really would be something awesome.

Sean Powell wrote:

Baron Eirik wrote:Yep, prices will be going up. I'll be posting when I actually change them. The other part of it, besides the heavy harvesting, is that the government of Malaysia wants to export finished products not raw rattan, so their duty structures and export limits are reflecting that.

Hmmm, what would it cost to have someone in Malaysia carve rattan waster blanks?

S~

you'd be taking them off making Nike's, so probably $90 but at least it would be for a pair of wasters

A rattan shortage means more than the availability of rattan goes down, it also affects the quality.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/50288439@N03/tags/damage/

Whenever they come up with a decent alternative material, I'm ready...

Randy W wrote:

Sean Powell wrote:

Baron Eirik wrote:Yep, prices will be going up. I'll be posting when I actually change them. The other part of it, besides the heavy harvesting, is that the government of Malaysia wants to export finished products not raw rattan, so their duty structures and export limits are reflecting that.

Hmmm, what would it cost to have someone in Malaysia carve rattan waster blanks?

S~

you'd be taking them off making Nike's, so probably $90 but at least it would be for a pair of wasters

"The minimum wage will be set at 900 ringgit per month, or $297, for workers on the Malaysian Peninsula, and 800 ringgit for those in the states of Sabah and Sarawak, on the island of Borneo, Prime Minister Najib Razak said late Monday, in announcing the details of the new legislation." NY Times 5/1/12 article.

Assuming a 160 hour work month - big assumption - that would be an hourly wage of $1.86 - for the people getting the upper end.

So, less than $3 per waster for actual labor carving the blank. And that's after they get this wage increase.

So, it would be pretty darn cheap to have the wasters carved over there. But we would be stuck with whatever size and pattern some manager determined was the most marketable/cost effective.

Having experienced it as a customer, overseas quality control is a real pain. I have a fairly long accounting of my efforts to get a helmet fixed via the Ukraine, here on the archive.