Plano Aikido Center

The New Student Guide, recently released by the United States Aikido Federation, is available here, and a permanent link is in the left-hand sidebar of our Forum pages.

Since our dojo is moving to a new location on Monday, March 1, 2010 (as seen in previous post), we needed to build a new practice floor.  Some of our senior members researched affordable but good floors, and found the following web pages describing Judo floors. After contacting these folks to confirm that they were happy with their floor, this is what we decided on. This will be the new martial arts floor at EC Athletics.

http://judoinfo.com/tatami.htm

http://www.judocalendar.com/denverdojo/Floorsystem.htm

The floor consists of 2 layers of plywood sheeting, sitting on a network of foam cubes. The cubes provide some “give” without being bouncy like springs, and of the course the plywood itself  will give a bit too. The attached video shows us having a good time putting the floor together over the weekend of 2/20 – 2/21, 2010. We had just finished practice and testing at the old facility, so of course we needed some pizza before we got started. You can see the number of people working on our floor. With that amount of help, I would say it took about 3 hours on Saturday to mark the bottom panels and glue the blocks on them, and 2 or 3 hours on Sunday to assemble the whole thing.

So it didn’t take very long, but preparation was the key. We had cut the foam blocks the week before, had the wood and other supplies at the new facilities when we got there, and Sensei had prepared a template to use for marking the wood for cube glueing.

All that is left is to put the padded layer on top of the plywood floor, and finish out the edges — put something around the sides. More pics and video as the floor is finished.