Bobs Stickmaking Pages - Collector's item #C036: An old whangee cane walking stick


	C036 - Collector's item: An old whangee cane walking stick Approx. dimensions: Overall length 34" / 86cm Diameter of shaft 5/8" / 15mm (near the top!), tapering to 3/4" / 20mm (near the bottom!).
	This is a good old Charlie Chaplin type whangee cane. As one would expect it's quite flexible and doesn't give a lot of support, but the nice patina and typical "stretch" marks show it has some age. There is something a bit odd about it though... A cane normally tapers down from the top to the bottom, yes? Well, not this one - it tapers the other way, with the thick end at the bottom! When I first noticed this, my initial thought was that it had been made upside-down. Bamboo and other cane stems grow from a thick base and get thinner towards the tip, don't they? So like most other natural stick materials, we turn the stem upside-down to get the thick end at the top. This is what we think of as the "right way up" for a stick (If you are not totally confused yet, just read on - you soon will be!). Therefore, in order to make a stick the "wrong way up", we would use the stem the way it grew originally, with the thin end on top. Having figured this out, I went and had a lie-down in a darkened room until my head stopped throbbing. When I had recovered sufficiently I had another look at the cane. This was a mistake, as my head started throbbing again when I realised the leaf nodes were actually pointing downwards - so the cane hadn't been made the wrong way up after all, but had been made with the stem upside-down (which, remember, is the normal way up to a stickmaker). This meant that, since the thick end was at the bottom, the stem must have grown thicker towards the top instead of thinner. So in this case perhaps the right way to make the stick would have been the "wrong" way up?
	Whatever, we have a cane with the handle at the thin end and the tip at the thick end. Here you can see some details of the handle and the shaft.
		When I acquired this cane, it was only 31-1/2" / 80cm long. The ferrule was missing and the tip was badly worn. So I made up a long tip from a piece of deer antler and fitted this to the end along with a spacer of thick sheet copper and a steel-tipped brass ferrule. I camouflaged the white antler by staining it in a mottled pattern using potassium permanganate. This extension brought the length up to a more generally useful 34" / 86cm.
So here we have a cane that looks perfectly normal at first, but is actually rather unusual!
SOLD Return to "Collectors' Sticks" page