Being a teenager and broke, I couldn't afford to spend hundreds of dollars on a set of torches or knives. Fortunately, my dad has a wood shop with tons of cool equipment and machines I used to make my own props.



My first set of clubs were made from plastic bottles and a cut up broomstick. I filled the bottles with sawdust and nailed them onto the end of the dowels. Then I wrapped electrical tape around the joint to keep sawdust from working its way out. By and large, these worked really well. A little tough on the hands, but no worse than cheap unibody clubs.

My first set of torches were built in response to the high school yearbook. The students organizing it knew I could juggle, so they wanted a picture of me juggling some torches. I had none, and found they cost about 40 bucks apiece. That was entirely too much, so I made my own out of metal conduit, dowels, and little wooden balls. The wick is made of kevlar and lasts a really long time. They are fun to juggle, but the kerosene really sets off my allergies.

My homemade knives were built for the 2005 Spring Concert my high school band was playing. I made the handles a little more contoured than my torches, they were a great deal lighter, and the overall balance was pretty good. The blades are simply unsharpened 16 gauge sheet metal, and you can smack them together a few times to get a good clanking sound to impress the audience. If I were to make these again, I'd use thicker steel and go for stainless or something. Currently they easily bend and will rust in a heartbeat.

I also made some skull crusher clubs on my Noire River canoe trip. These were carved from a dead tree with a hatchet and weigh about 1.5 pounds apiece. They are very tiring to juggle, and hurt very bad when they land on your feet. Not to mention they're not exactly straight or weight matched.