4/8/2022

How To Use A Blackjack Sap

Designed for police and security personnel for personal defense, our Blackjack Slapper is made of high-quality leather. It has a hand-strap to keep it securely in your hand and it weighs a hefty 14 oz. The Blackjack Slapper gives you a weighty upper hand on an assailant!

This was an eight hour course on the history, and contextual implementation of short impact weapons. It was hosted at The Complete Combatant in Marietta, Ga. This course was magical in several ways and is a must take if you really dig leather and lead self-defense tools. I loved it because it deals with an arcane, but extremely effective, self defense implement. Larry Lindenman is a friend and mentor to me, and I’ve been reading and training with him since 2008 or so. It also was full of great trainers and practitioners, including Greg Ellifritz of Active Response Training, who I also consider a dear friend. It was a hell of a Saturday. Here’s a breakdown.

What is a Sap,Blackjack, or slungshot?

I’m not a historian on these tools, but I can give you a quick rundown on their construction. Here’s a recently published book on the history of these tools and their use if you’re interested in that. They were first documented in the 1700’s as a sailor’s tool made of pigskin and stuffed with sand used for some sort of impact duty on a ship. I guess they also realized you could get in a drunken brawl with them and they would work well as an impact weapon. They were flattened out and became saps in the 1940’s. They evolved,were perfected, and used to good effect up through the 1980’s when they fell out of favor.

Unlike a knife, which deals no ballistic impact, a sap can deal a real immediate physiological stop. They also don’t cause someone to bleed their loathsome blood-borne pathogens all over you when used in a fight (H/T The Tactical Professor for that point)

  1. The sap is easily carried next to the wallet in the back pocket, with enough material outside the pocket to acquire a grip and access. It has the advantage of two impact surfaces. You can choose to hit with the flat, or the edge, giving options in severity of damage depending on targeting. Saps are my preference.
  2. Leather Billy Clubs is a club or sap, a leather-covered hand weapon, designed to hit or knock you out. The round ones were also commonly known as billies, billy clubs, billie jacks, blackjacks, convoys, and the flat ones are also called slappers, slap stick, slapjacks, slap jacks, sap, sapper, beavertail sap basically because of it's unique shape.

A sap is a flattened lead weight wrapped in leather, often with a strap for retention. The sap is easily carried next to the wallet in the back pocket, with enough material outside the pocket to acquire a grip and access. It has the advantage of two impact surfaces. You can choose to hit with the flat, or the edge, giving options in severity of damage depending on targeting. Saps are my preference.

A blackjack is a cylindrical impact tool, usually with a spring running through the grip, and a lead weight cast onto the head, all wrapped up in leather. They’re harder to carry daily, but their sprung weight makes them extremely potent when striking.

A slungshot is some sort of weight, with a rope-like handle. Think a handkerchief tied around the hasp of a padlock. You choke your grip right up next to the weight, and swing it like that. Otherwise it bounces all over the place and can smash your face after you strike.

The Contextualized Self-Defense Approach

I’m not ruining any of the magic of working with Larry (or any Shivworks instructor) because the magic isn’t in the information, but in doing the work. You’ll quickly notice themes in any Shivworks instructor’s material. This is by design, and for simplicity. A clear path, with simple rules and goals, yields a high retention and success rate. That’s the elegance of the model these guys use.

The instruction progresses in a logical manner, with each following phase resulting from some failure of the previous phase. The coursework progresses from the managing unknowns phase which includes verbalization, movement, and the use of the fence hand posture.

Use

It then moves to a default cover position which is a non-diagnostic ‘helmet’ that helps you stay upright and conscious as a surprise attack is launched on you.

Then comes the grappling phase, where some simple modifications to proven sport grappling techniques address the possibility of your opponent having his own weapons. The goal is to get behind or tie up your opponent long enough to decide what to do next.

For this course, it was to access an impact tool and begin striking. It could also be accessing a pistol, a knife, or a throw to hit your opponent with the earth. The path is the same, no matter the tool you’re carrying. This is the power of this ‘system’ if you want to call it that.

After this worst-case scenario of having to access the tool in the fight, we worked on preemptive access, which is a whole lot easier.

Where and How to Strike?

While these are considered “less-lethal tools”, it’s really easy to deal a deadly blow with one, so some training is needed. The temple, base of skull, and possibility of a knock-out and secondary impact with the head bouncing off the pavement could certainly be deadly. We learned how to generate power through our hips and deliver blows in short arcs. The space needed to implement the tools is different than a blade or gun, so we worked those skills.

We concentrated on targeting large muscle groups, joints, clavicle, ribs, arms, thighs. We learned both broken strikes (think a piston pumping), and carry-through strikes (think slashes that set up strikes in the opposite direction).

Training Drones for practice

My New Foster Brother’s Sap

How To Use A Blackjack Sap Solution

The Foster Brothers are the gold standard for leather saps and jacks today. I took a picture of one of Larry’s saps, and asked Todd to make one for me. It arrived yesterday and I’m very pleased. I don’t know what model sap it is, I’m glad I took a photo to send with my request. FOSTER IMPACT DEVICES

Tidbits

  • Don’t waste your money on a ‘coin purse’ sap. Everyone (TSA, cops, etc) knows what it is, and coins aren’t really dense enough to add meaningful weight for your strikes.
  • Why not brass-knuckles? Simply put, access. A blackjack can be accessed in-fight like a fixed blade knife and be put right into action. Knucks require you to put 4 fingers in 4 finger sized holes. Knucks are more of a pre-meditated and preemptive impact tool.
  • It’s legal for GA residents to carry an impact weapon, you should check for your state before you buy/make your own.
  • The LAMB method full text document HERE



“The man who carries a weapon intended to crush the skull of his adversary,” wrote Fred Rexer in 1978, “is probably a lot closer to the men in bearskin breech clouts than he would like to think.” Rexer was talking about the sap or blackjack, a rounded leather shell filled with lead powder, lead shot, or a molded weight, with or without a spring steel shank to increase the tool’s response on impact. While the sap is compact and simple in design, it is also remarkably powerful when used to strike a person. The author of The Brass Knuckle Bible went on to claim, “A skinny kid can tear a person’s jaw completely off his face or render an opponent dead with one blow from a blackjack.”

That was more than thirty years ago and, despite Rexer’s hyperbole, there’s no doubt the sap or blackjack largely fell out of favor with citizens and law enforcement alike because it was deemed too effective. Where once many police officers’ uniform slacks incorporated a pocket just the right size to carry a sap, few citizens today have even heard of it (outside of novels featuring hard-boiled detectives). Those law enforcement supply companies that did produce saps no longer do, and many municipalities outlaw the possession and carry of blackjacks.

“Most of the companies, like Bucheimer, stopped producing saps in the mid seventies to early eighties,” explained Todd Foster, when I originally interviewed him for Tactical Knives magazine. “I bought a cheap sap in an Army/Navy shop in 1996 and carried it for a few years before losing it. I really couldn’t find one I liked to replace it.” After much trial and error, he successfully reverse-engineered his own saps.

I first interviewed Todd several years ago for Tactical Knives, but producing a subsequent review for this page proved a little challenging. That’s because saps and blackjacks aren’t legal in my home state — a fact that forced me to conduct my evaluation, and take my photos, in another location where it was legal to do so. I was not disappointed. These are incredibly well made saps that exhibit beautiful craftsmanship and attention to detail. These photographs do not do them justice. Foster saps are the standard by which modern saps and blackjacks should be judged.

Foster, who lives in High Point, North Carolina, has been a butcher for two decades. Over those years he has been a part-time leather worker. Since 2004, he has been producing custom leather, machine-stitched saps for law enforcement, military personnel, and private collectors.

“All my saps are hand cut from bull hide for the most part,” Foster explains, “and hand finished and stitched on a old Tippmann sewing machine. The ‘load’ or ‘frame’ of the sap is solid cast lead [incorporating] a half-inch tempered steel flat spring.” The result is a superbly crafted, top-quality leather pocket club that exhibits the richness of custom leather work and a surprising heft in the palm.

Foster’s soft shot-filled saps are all hand made in the United States and include his popular coin purse model. The coin purse sap is unique in that it is not heavy until filled with change, which increases its weight significantly.

The little coin purse strikes with authority and can give even the largest man pause. I first tested these for the magazine and now, years later, I can say that Todd’s work (which was excellent then) has only improved with time. He continues to turn out incredibly well-crafted pieces that are executed flawlessly.

There’s good reason for this. Todd stresses that his products are a labor of love. “I make all my own molds for each model sap and cast the lead in house,” he says. “Saps can be made with or without the flat spring. Without seems to hit a lot harder.”

Hitting, and hitting hard with very little effort, is what makes the sap so powerful. Even someone with relatively little strength in their shoulder, arm, or wrist can swing the sap with sufficient force to deal real damage when they make contact.

One very easy method for deploying the sap is to smack the flat of the tool on the opponent’s temple or the side of his face. It’s very easy to give someone a concussion this way. If the sap is swung with great force, it can even open lacerations using the “edge” of the leather. While striking to the lower torso is of relatively limited value (just as punching to the gut is not as effective as punching the head), striking to the clavicle or shoulder can stop an opponent in his tracks or drive him to his knees.

There is a revival, of sorts, where interest in saps and blackjacks is concerned. Prominent among these is the Facebook group Blackjacks, Saps, and Knuckledusters. Not surprisingly, Todd’s work figures prominently there.

“Saps make great tools for self defense,” Todd explains. “Being flat, they are easy to carry in a back pocket or inside the waistband. They’re basically force multipliers. You can go ‘light’ on someone to soften them up to get away, or go full steam ahead. Saps work great when targeting large muscle groups for limb destruction by attacking the arms and hands.”

How To Use A Blackjack Sap

While saps are legal to own and collect in Foster’s state of North Carolina, he points out that they are illegal to carry on your person. “The main reason most states frown on the carry of saps is that they are very effective tools,” he says. “Most police departments stop carrying them and went to [collapsible] batons for that reason.”

How To Use A Blackjack Sap For Beginners

One alternative that may (I stress may) be legal where you are is the pocket stick. Also known as a kubotan or yawara (the former a brand name and the latter the Japanese term for a small dowel), the pocket stick is an extremely portable, effective impact weapon that concentrates the force of your strike into the tip of the stick.

Todd sent out a six-inch aluminum pocket stick that is as simple and elegant as it is effective. It’s an aluminum rod with a metal pocket clip that is perfect for those situations in which a pocket stick sends just the right message. Fit and finish are, of course, excellent. The stick is light, handy, comfortable to hold, and authoritative in use.

How To Use A Blackjack Sapphire

If you are one of those fortunate citizens who live in an area where saps are legal to possess, do not overlook this practical, reliable, and eminently powerful weapon. Todd Foster can be reached online a www.fosterimpactdevices.com.