One of the students at our dojo, Jason, is a metalworker at tbailey.com/construction/ by trade and a brilliant engineer, and he built us a custom piece of dojo equipment. This is a picture of it I took on my phone today (the only camera I had available at the time) but the makiwara weren’t attached at the moment.
This kind of thing is a great asset to our dojo and we are very glad to have it! It has two mounting arms on the front for heavy bags to hang over the mat, and those can have their height and distance from the frame adjusted. There are mounting arms on the back for a speed bag and bob-and-weave bag, both of which are adjustable and the speed bag mount can actually be removed and replaced with any number of custom attachments that he builds. There are pull-up and dip bars for both adults and children (adult ones are mounted higher and further apart). There are also two makiwara mounting brackets which can be clamped securely onto just about any point on the frame–on the bottom as a standard makiwara, or it can be hung upside-down from the top or even at an angle from one of the support struts.
We made liberal use of this new tool in class on Monday and actually snapped the wood in both makiwara mounts (they were just pine 2×4’s and were there as temporary makiwara until Jason makes oak leaf-style ones), but the makiwara mounts are at the perfect angle and have just the right amount of give. Jason actually just dropped by today and installed the new leaf-spring-style makiwara made of oak, and they are awesome! We also found how great the heavy bag mounts are! Jason built them at angles so that the one closest from the wall is much less likely to actually hit the wall than it was when we had a standard heavy bag stand, and the one hanging out over the mat is angled far enough that you can actually hit the bag hard and it swings past its support post instead of slamming into it. According to Sensei Poage, he has already had people asking how much they cost, but we’ll have to leave that up to Jason!