:-)

Going back a bit, why would you want to harden the wood? Surely its never going to be as hard as the metal, and you want it to be strong, not hard, to support the back - otherwise the first ding in the metal is going to crack it. (Wood glued onto titanium may actually make matters worse, since the titanium is likely to be able to deform and bounce back where the underlying wood would just make it more brittle. Or I could be talking nonsense.)

Ive always been keen on the idea of armour deflecting or avoiding impact energy, rather than trying to absorb it - so the softer plastics sound interesting. Its all very well having 40kJ in a disk, but that only helps if you can transfer that energy into damaging your opponent.

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Fluppet