Wow. This post came quick.
So I'm pretty sure that if you've ever set foot on a college campus for more than a week, you've probably heard of a certain group of slightly nerdy Honors Program guys (I'm being nice) who go out on odd days and fight with foam-padded PVC weapons—appropriately dubbed "foam fighters".
Back in high school, I was one of them.
Don't look at me like that. =P The guys I hung with were actually serious about fighting styles and what, and one of them was my loading crew captain—a rather burly guy who tends to drift into a Scotch-Irish brogue when he gets agitated....even though no one in his family has set foot on British Isle soil in four generations and all his immediate family sound like normal Tennessee middle class.
We'd take a few Saturdays or so and "forge" these things to specific designs; we could usually get about three or four decent complete weapons for about $40 total, depending on what we wanted to make. I think my friend's war axe—which he later broke on my chest—cost about $28 or so because of padding issues. Being the nerd that I am, my first two projects were a spear (whose tip I got clever with design-wise, effectively turning it into a monk's spade purely by accident) and a pair of bladed tonfa inspired by Talim's main weapons from Soul Caliber 2. Those things are nasty, by the way; they just want to reach out and touch someone.
We also made a katana, blade curved as close to actual specifications as possible with PVC. That process involved heating the piping intended to be shaped with a hair dryer until it moved just so, and then shifting an eighth of an inch down, and again, and again, and again.....
For padding, we used standard PVC padding. It's that black squishy tube stuff with the self-sealing cut. Sure, you could feel the blow when the thing smacked you, but all it did was sting a little, and there was no permanent damage; we made certain of that. The padded weapons were then taped according to what part it was: duct tape marked the killing edges, black electrical tape marked the flats, and black, red, or yellow tape was used for the hilts/pommels/whatever you want to call it.
A good portion of our actual "spar" sessions consisted of us talking each other through various moves, stances, footwork, and strengths/weaknesses, as far as our inexperienced minds would let us. We knew simple range stuff; for example, a Polearm has the advantage over a Knife as long as the knife-wielder is outside the Polearm's range, but once the Knife gets inside things get ugly for the Polearm. And if you're using a man-and-a-half and you get an arm taken out by a lucky strike, you can grip the base of the blade above the hilt-guard (which is historically dull) to alleviate your control problems from using a two-handed weapon with only one hand.
Stuff like that.
We did have the brief honor of working with a group who actually fought live steel, but used foam (and wood) to train with. Unfortunately, my schedule at the time prevented me from making more than two appearances, but it was fun, and a good learning experience. I won a few, I lost more, I got royally pwned a lot; general good times.
And then I looked into the guys up at our campus.
Dear Lord, have mercy.
