Making of Butokuden Kendo Dojo wood floor

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Making of Butokuden Kendo Dojo wood floor

Some people had asked me how I made the wooden floor of the BUTOKUDEN Dojo, so today I will write now I made the Butokuden Kendo Dojo wood floor myself.

Our Dojo used to have a plastic tile, which covered a layer of plywood. Originally, we rented this location, because it used to be used by a Dance Studio. The Dojo had a black plastic tile, which covered a layer of 1/2 inch plywood. Although it looked quite hard, it was not that bad. However, with time, the black tiles started to break, and that caused a lot of problems. This is how our Dojo looked 5 years ago.

During the Summer of 2008, I took on this project of re-doing the entire floor for our Dojo. The project took about 1 week, with two other workers (Daniel and Manuel) and I. We wanted to have a soft floor, suitable for Kendo. However, as I am renting this location, I did not want to invest too much. So the Dojo floor needed to be suitable for Kendo and other Martial Arts, but at the same time economical.

Below, I am going to explain a fairly economical and fast way of building a Kendo Dojo floor. I am sure there are much better and expensive way, but this was my solution at at that time. Maybe when I purchase a building and build a Dojo, I can invest more. We have been using for about 2 years, and it is holding pretty good.

Step 1: Prepare the bottom layer
a. Take off all the old floor.
b. Place a 1/4 in pieces of wood over the concrete. This is to give room for the floor to bend, when doing Fumikomi. If you do not put this piece, the floor will be as hard as concrete.
c. I spaced the wood pieces every 2 ft. You can control the hardness of the floor with the distance of these woods, however, remember that the plywood that goes on top are 4 x 8 ft2.
d. These wood pieces were nailed down, using a concrete nail.

From 080818-NewDojo

Step 2: Place the plywood on top of the wood pieces.
Screw down the rough surface plywood on top of the wood pieces. I used the 3/4 in plywood for this layer. It does not have to have a nice surface, as you will be covering with another layer of plywood on top.

From 080818-NewDojo

Step 3: Place the nicer surface plywood
After placing the rough surface plywood, place the nicer finish plywood on top. I chose the Oak finish. Make sure to take the corner roughness using a high grade sand paper. That will minimize the corner pealing later.

The way we did this is by screwing it to the bottom layer plywood. The screw heads should not show up on top of the wood. That will be dangerous to the feet, during Keiko. So the head should be securely screwed below the surface. It should be about 1/8 in below the surface. After all wood is placed, fill in the hole with the wood filler.

From 080818-NewDojo

From 080818-NewDojo

From 080818-NewDojo

Step 4: Sand the floor
Use a high grade sander to sand the surface. Do not do too much, otherwise you will take off the top layer of the plywood.
We rented an industrial sander from Home Depot.

Step 5: Wood foot board on the walls
We placed pine wood 6 inch wood on the walls to protect the wall.

From 080818-NewDojo

Step 6: Wall board
We had some wood left over (we actually mis calculated…), so we placed a nice wall board on one size of the wall. It actually gave protection to the wall, as well as a nice look to the Dojo. This is the side that I usually stand, during Keiko, I throw the young guys around, and in the past we had wholes on the wall. So this wood wall protects from that type of rough practice.

From 080818-NewDojo

Step 7: Floor painting
a. We used an almost natural color stain to stain the floor.
b. Then we painted the wall with a clear coat of non shiny lacquer.

This is how our Dojo looks now.

From 100421-Butokuden

I hope this gives a introduction for people that are thinking of building a new Dojo floor.

Taro Ariga
BUTOKUDEN Kancho