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F.A.Q. I get a lot of emails asking for advice -- so many that it is physically impossible to answer them all. I try to respond to the interesting to questions, but the reality of the situation is that I may not answer you if you email me. Also, it gets really annoying when people ask questions which have answers already on the site -- especially about equipment construction. I get the following questions often enough that I figured I would put them up in the form of an f.a.q.. Please read through these and look around the site before mailing me with questions. Also, be polite -- I am constantly surprised by how rude and assuming complete strangers are in email. I do not respond to such mail, but I am thinking of posting a collection of the particularly bad ones... More questions and answers will be posted as more patterns emerge in my email. Q. How long have you been doing this fire stuff? A. I have been performing with fire since the late 1990s, but prior to that I had over 10 years of martial arts weapons training/practice with a heavy emphasis on staff and spear work. I learned to use a whip both as a weapon and in the S&M context. Q. Did you speed up the movies of you spinning fire? A. No. Everything on this site is real. I really do spin that fast, and I really can do all these tricks. I still perform enough that I would get exposed pretty quickly if I couldn't do all this in real life. After enough questions I felt the need to make this clear. Q. Do you make your own gear? How do I build a firestaff, firewhip, firesword [etc...]? A. I make all my own gear. I get a ton of questions about gear, so this section is somewhat extensive. First off let me state my biases up-front. I like to make my own gear. This is important to me because I want to be totally sure that it is well put together as I will be the one holding the bag if something goes wrong. Moreover, by making my own gear I can be sure it is exactly to my specifications. There is no one right way to make fire implements. Rather, there are as many ways to make this stuff as there are people using them. I tend to want a really big flame and thus put on a lot of wick. The basic factors to keep in mind when making implements are: 1) balance Balance is how the weight is distributed in the implement. It is critical when making staffs and swords, as balance will determine the axis around which the implement rotates. It is not particularly important with a whip, and from what I understand, it is irrelevant with poi. 2) weight Making implements heavier will, up to a certain point, allow you to spin them faster. However weight will also make the implement increasingly unwieldy. Also, heavy implements are a great way to give yourself a repetitive stress disorder, and hurt yourself if you fuck up. 3) drag Drag is caused by the resistance of the fire in the air. A good rule of thumb is: the more exposed wick, the bigger the flame, the more drag. Increased weight will help offset drag, but may lead to other problems. The unofficial fourth factor is cost. Kevlar wick is really expensive [ i.e. Your five foot bastard sword with 100 feet of wick on it ain't gonna come cheap]. Generally, the more exposed surface area of wick you have the bigger flame you will have. The more total wick [as in thicker rolls] the more fuel your implement will hold and the longer it will burn. Making a firestaff: I use a firestaff which consists of: a five foot, 1/2 inch aluminum pipe with an oak core, double Kevlar wicks on either end [a total of about 40 feet of wick], and tennis racket grips. My staff is somewhat out of the ordinary. Most fire dancers use 1" aluminum piping. I use 1/2" piping because it cuts through the air faster and with less drag which allows me to put on more wick. The wood core serves to keep the aluminum from bending on impact, which is unavoidable if you are choreographing fight sequences. The wood core also helps give the staff some bounce which is useful for tricks like the dropkick. The wicks are attached by wrapping the Kevlar wick around the ends of the shaft and securing them with a steel wire which goes through the shaft and the wick on both sides and is then wrapped around the wick in a band. This assures me that they are not going to fly off into the audience. When you need to put on new wicks, just cut the wire and remove the old wick. If you get sick of getting burned by the exposed wires, like I have, then sew on another piece of kevlar on top of the roll of wick. Here is a picture of my short aluminum firestaff: Here is a closeup of the kevlar wick cover I sewed onto it: Making a firewhip is easy: just get about 7.5 feet of 1/2 inch kevlar rope and a 14 inch long 1/2 inch diameter metal pipe. Thread the rope through the pipe and tie a solid knot on the end. Then tape the knot to the handle so there is no chance that the rope will come out during use. Viola: instant firewhip. Now that you have one I recommend that you never use it. All whips, including fire whips, work better if they are tapered so that they get gradually thinner toward the end. I recomend attaching a thin braided string or cutting thong at the the end, so it makes lots of noise when you crack it. This is slightly more complex a process, but probably worth some experimenting. Here is a picture of a few of my firewhips: Making a firesword can be a bit trickier. I have seen a lot of different construction techniques, all of which work, although some better for particular applications than others. I have done a bunch of choreographed fights with flaming weapons and it is a lot of fun. For that application I recommend the following: get a 3.5 to 4 foot long aluminum pipe and a wood dowel which is the same diameter as the inside of the pipe -- you want it to be as tight a fit as possible. Put the wood dowel inside the pipe and secure it with a couple of screws [The wood core will help keep the sword from bending on impact during the fight sequence, but this doesn't mean that you can't bend or break the sword with heavy impact...] Then wrap the business end of the sword with with 1/2" kevlar rope wick. Make the handle part bigger than you would normally need on a sword so as to be sure that you have at least 8 - 10 inches between where your hands are and where the wick starts or you will get burned [if you don't like that then make a fireproof guard and put it at the base of the 'blade']. Here is a picture of my firesword: Making Poi I have no idea. I don't use poi and have never made a set. Q. What should I wear when I play with fire? A. Generally, I recommend sticking with heavy cotton or leather for costumes, as synthetic fabrics tend to burn or melt. I also recommend some additional safety gear: By safety gear I am not talking about fire extinguishers and wet towels. Here I am referring to clothing and other stuff worn while playing with fire. In my opinion the most critical item of safety equipment is the do rag. I have seen people catch their hair on fire way too many times. It is not pretty. Nor is it sexy, cool or good in any other way. Rather, it smells bad, and you look dumb for a very long time. Oh, it can also cause severe burns and lead to a trip to the emergency room. Buy a bandana and tie it around your head. You might have noticed that in every picture of me playing with fire on this website I am wearing a bandana. Another thing to consider are goggles. After a rather close call while practicing new tricks with the firewhip, I have decided to wear goggles while using it in strong wind conditions [hey man, if I fuck my eyes up and can no longer read I just threw three years of law school, and my career to date into the toilet]. However, safety goggles don't have to be the lame contraptions you might remember from high school science class -- here is a picture of mine: Pretty styling. While not recomended for staff and poi work, I wear heavy leather gauntlets when perfroming with the firewhip: The gauntlets protect my hands from fuel spray, and allow me to handle the wick, which is often necessary in fire fetish. Q. What type of fuel or fuel mixture do you use/recommend? A. I prefer white gas [a.k.a. camping stove fuel] because I want a big bright flame, and white gas burns very brightly. I usually use Coleman brand stove fuel: It has also been my experience that at high speeds white gas has a maintains brighter flame than kerosene, lamp oil, or mixtures thereof. Additionally, kerosene and lamp oil are very smoky and they stink which is a major disadvantage if you are performing inside. White gas does burn up somewhat faster then these other fuels, but I think that the advantages are well worth it. Also, white gas is the only fuel I will use with a firewhip. When you make a fireball with the whip, it begins as a spray of fuel. While a white gas fireball will usually burn up before it hits the ground, other fuels don't burn up as fast, and can end up making a burning pool of fuel at your feet. Not good. Q. Tell me more about blindfolded fire performance. A. Here are some basic pointers. This is by no means intended to be a definitive guide to blindfolded fire, rather, just a collection of tips which I hope will be useful: - First off try closing your eyes while spinning an unlit implement, that way if you lose control you can open your eyes and protect yourself. I recommend finding a flat open area that no one is likely to wander through. Eventually you will get to the point where you can 'see' the staff [or other implement] in your mind. - When you are comfortable spinning with your eyes closed then try a blindfold, but keep to simple tricks. Some tricks which you can do easily with open eyes become very difficult when blindfolded, this is especially true for tricks where the staff leaves your hands -- the more times it rotates in the air without you touching it the harder it will be to accurately track with your mind. There are a lot of moves that are nearly impossible blindfolded, and it is good to have some idea of what they are before you are lit up and on stage. For example, I can do the one handed flips while blindfolded without much difficulty, but two or three flips in the air almost never works. Same is true for drop kicks. - Don't light up until you are totally comfortable spinning blindfolded. The adrenalin rush will not give you any extra skill, although it might dull the pain a little if you hurt yourself. - You should always have a friend hanging out with a wet towel in case something goes wrong and this is doubly true if you are blindfolded. Your firesafety person is especially critical when blindfolded because he/she will keep other people from getting in your way, and let you know if you are close to the edge of the stage. Q. Tell me more about this Fire Fetish stuff. A. Fire play of some sort or another has been around for a long time in the fetish community. However, use of firewhips in this context appears to be a rather new thing. For those who have not seen it before it makes quite an impression, even the most jaded BDSM veteran. All this is true because of how incredibly dangerous the whole process is. For this reason I am not providing anything but the most general information and instructions about fire fetish, expecially involving a firewhip. I don't want to be, even indirectly, responsible for the injury which will surely occur when some inexperienced moron tries it. However, if you are really serious, I moderate a discussion group on firefetish as part of the tribe.net site. Q. Where did the whip:skills section go? A. After much consideration I decided to take down the whip skills section. I think that too many people who were not ready to be using a firewhip were getting ideas from it. I don;t want to be responsible for some jackass huring himself or burning a nightclub down. Sorry. I replaced it with the whip:fetish section though. Q. Do you know that the Wikipedia Fire Dancing article totally ripped off big sections of your FAQ? A. Actually, I helped edit the Wikipedia article on firedancing. And, I wrote the one on Fire fetish. Q. Will you link to my website? A. As fireninja.com has gotten more and more traffic I have been getting this question a lot, especially from other fire performers. The short answer is that if I don't know you [as in we have hung out in real life] I am probably not goting to link to your site. Sorry. My links page would be 10 screens long if I linked to everyone who asked.   Q. Are you single? A. Usually... Q. Will you send me naked pictures? A. No. Don't ask.

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