Hey guys! Adrian and I have been skyping about design ideas for the past two hours, and well, basically, here’s the new bachi shape we all need!
It only took a combination of Ouzo and Tequila to figure it out! 
Chris… is it possible?
Could i preorder one of those?
HAHAHAHA!! I was laying in bed and read this and started laughing so loud, I woke the dogs up!
Hrm, interesting design, although now I fear we might have to change the strings to compensate … barbed wire, perhaps?
haha. ill make the handle as epic as i can, but the blade may be stuck being wimpy plastic…
Dude, that even would be worth it. 
Oh! You know, Michael O. made a homemade bachi with water buffalo horn -
Perhaps the same could be done. 
interesting! i was looking into bone as a possible cheap replacement for bekkou but at this point have given up on it. too hard to get the nice flicky feeling we all want
Ah yes. Bone is quite stiff anyway, I think? Horn has been used as a cheaper alternative to bekkou for a while, I think.
I thought we were trying not to kill animals … 
Unless … do the horns fall off naturally? (Haven’t had a water buffalo as a pet recently, so I forget.)
yup buffalo horns just drop off each year
oh, okay, thank you!
whew Puts out the flaming PETA torch
10 bucks for a piece of water buffalo horn - is it solid? I couldn’t tell.
There were tons of them on Ebay!
i trust it. i bought a nice piece of camel bone to make my bridge for about $10
i have quite a bit of chunks of horn if anyone wants it? there’s not enough for a whole bachi unless you laminate it, but there’s enough for ‘blades’
I’m uk but happy to post to any of you guys
I just posted to show that there were tons of water buffalo horn on Ebay -
I meant, is it solid all the way through? How do you carve it? Do you have to wet it? And how would we do “Blades” - do you carve the wood first, and then make sheets of bone, and shape them into triangles?
-am a little too hot n sleepy so i hope i make sense-
slices of horn will be solid all the way, only the core of the horn can be hollow or softer and cleaned away.
You shape it with a saw and/or dremel and sandpapers
no you don’t have to wet it, but it helps in sanding to dampen it slightly to reduce the dust, BUT it leaves the surface slightly fibrous and you’d need to dry sand after to smooth it down.
the blade part can be made like i did; cutting out the outside shape and sanding down and cutting from there to get the thinness (a good power sanding is almost essential),
OR you can split the chunks down more than i did and insert it into a wood handle before the final shaping.
OR
you can cut the wood and horn in rectangles, laminate together and then cut out your bachi in one go.
it’s down to your imagination.
horn was so interesting to work with, it’s kinda like plastic, you can cut it very thin and heat bond it together, you can boil it in water to make glue, you can heat it and bend it and allsorts.
Ooo, cool! Amanda, you are like the DIY Queen of All Things Crafty on Bachido, lol. Thank you!
XD why thank you!
I’ve been a historical re-enactor and crafter for a long time, and sometimes it’s nice to just get something to play with, it’s amazing what odd information you can pick up.
It’s not really reinventing the bachi, but I have always wanted to play shamisen with a biwa bachi.
Seems like the flares at the bottom would be more comfortable to hold.
The biwa bachi are gimoungous! But super-cool looking, lol - I sort of wanted to buy one just to have as artwork.
I think it would be crazy hard to sukui with them, as well as get them on the string you need. It seems as biwa players mostly slap and rub the strings with them, rather than getting solo lines out of them. I dont know, has anyone ever tried to play a shamisen with a biwa bachi?
My FAVORITE biwa performance … (I think I have watched this video a hundred times! I love love love it!)
Well if I used a biwa bachi for shamisen I’d custom make one that is smaller and thinner. I just like their shape.
You’re right about them as artwork. They would look cool framed on the wall in a shadow box.