Kind of reviving this... How would you recommend making a tama heavier? Or making a ken lighter without creating a base cup hole? Is this even possible? I have an amazing setup I am planning on making in the future. Craft Shift maple ken with legaxis Japan tama. The ken is 85 grams and the tama is 80. I generally like my kendamas tama heavy, but it will not work out with this setup. Is it worth it to still make it, or should I find some other combination to do? Lots of personal questions, but I would love to see how all of you deal with things like this.
Personally, I try to leave the tama alone when it comes to weight. Any weight alteration would be on the ken, whether by reducing (base cup hole) or adding (slaybands or other similar product). If u wanna reduce weight on the ken w/o using a hole, and if you have a good hand drill, try doing what grip does and putting grooves/notches on the ken.
If you don't want a full on hole in the base cup then try just making the cups deeper overall. A shaped sanding/grinding bit for a drill should work. Also cutting a groove around the section midway between the slipgrip and base ring that doesn't interfere with catching a stall could also take a few grams out. There's not going to be an easy and reliable way to add weight to the tama. You could cross drill it and put some molten lead in the holes but that would be some work.
Im my opinion heavier setups are always easier to play with except if youre doing many flips like trips or quads of anything. I can only do juggles to spike with heavy tamas because light tamas have the hole moving much faster in the air so you need to be more subtle when juggling to spike. Also, according to the rule of thumb in juggling the heavier (and the longer) an object is the faster it moves while youre balancing it. So I feel like it’s much easier to balance and control heavy kens.
I've found that copious amounts of kenditoner, coconut oil, and other wood sealers can help with balancing kens. The most I've been able to achieve is making each piece (serato/sword) 1 gram heavier. This is due to the sealer filling in the pores of the wood.
i tend not to worry too much about weight matching, i dont even have a scale, the exception to this would be any kendama im spending a good chunk of money on, but thats only because im spending 100$ or more on it i find having a heavier ken is great for flips and having a heavier tama is great for stall tricks
Not sure if it's already been discussed in this thread, but in terms of ken-tama weight ratio, people generally seem to favor dead on kendamas as well as tama-heavy setups. Anyone here like Ken-heavy stuff? If so, why?
Bumping this, just got my bonz mod in the mail and im not really happy with the weights. The ken is way too light (65g) for my liking and the 74g tama so i was wondering how i could add weight to the ken? Thought about putting some weights in the lunar hole to balance it out. Anyone got any ideas?