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Here's a quick and simple contact staff you can put together with things you might have lying around the house.
Contact Staff is a form of object manipulation derived from contact juggling and traditional staff. It involves lots of moves done using your torso, rather than just your hands, to manipulate the staff. It's pretty sweet.
Contact staffs differ from regular staffs in their weight and handle type. From what I gather, the best contact staffs have solid cores, weighty ends, and sticky handles.
I wanted to learn contact staff after seeing members of the Vulcan (see vid below). But I didn't want to shell out $40-65 for a professional rig, and I wanted to see how much I liked spinning it before buying (or building) a fire rig. So I spent a few hours putting together this simple staff, and the weight and balance turned out pretty great!
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A broom handle or solid wood dowel. Length is up to you, but it will likely fall between 3.5 and 5 feet. Check out this thread for a discussion of contact staff length. (Summary--your contact staff will probably be longer and heavier than your regular staff.)
Old bicycle tubes - I used 4 road tubes and 1 mountain tube. You could experiment to find the weight that works best for you. My staff is pretty heavy but I find that keeps it slow and helps me learn the moves.
Also:
Bike handlebar tape and electrical tape
Scissors
Flat head thumbtacks
Duct tape
Ruler
Sharpie
Muscle.
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I couldn't get ahold of bike tubes so I used two tennis balls at the ends which has been working just fine for practicing. My next staff will be shorter and with the tacky ended inner tubes though! :)
this one was fantastic!