After I learned some Escrima stick and knife fighting from various people (Remy Presas, Bobby Taboada, Dom Lopez etc.) and looked at all the tapes I could get my hands on of famous Filipino masters doing their stuff then I thought there was definitely something wrong with the Wing Chun Bat Jam Do training that people do.
So at least I would say that anything commercially available for Wing Chun knife techniques doesn't do the job. Perhaps in the past, people were able to use it.
I think doing the form slowly is step one. Then there is drilling that with a partner in various ways. Some ways include knife against knife, knife against sword and knife against spear and pole.
Then get some protection on your hands and head and spar with these things at random. The spear against the knife is a great match. Knife against knife is very fast, maybe a little messy and both sides usually get cut.
I think these days there is more interest in mixed martial arts skills so the weapons are going by the wayside in favor of grappling skills. The weapons can occupy all of your training time if you want to be good. But because of the gun, why bother or else you will look like that guy in Raiders of the Lost Arc who was swing his sword around.
Some clubs do the weapons as a bit of a muscle workout. But probably a good weight training program is better.
Robert Chu told me a long time ago that Hawkins Cheung is pretty good with the knives. So maybe there are a few people around who can do it. If Wong Shun Leung was able to beat a fencer with the knives then maybe he wasn't too bad.
With a different fencer maybe he would have had different results.
Back in the 80's we used to fight Escrima stick vs Wing Chun Butterfly knife. I got whacked real good in the head causing blood to drip down my face from a padded Escrima stick wielded by one of Ancion Bacon's students or grand students. My footwork wasn't fast enough. But another guy in the club who was also a fencing teacher matched the Escrima stick pretty good using the Bat Jam Do and fencing footwork skills. The two killed each other off simultaneously. They went full speed at each other.
For the art of it all I think knife against spear is great practice. It's the classical battle of long against short. There may be some transfer of skills from this into the hand against kicking realm of fighting.
Yesterday I just watched the fighting sequence at the end of the movie Rob Roy MacGregor, it was very well done and more realistic looking than most choreographies. Of course I don't know what realistic looking means since I have never watched any real duels. Probably it is more realistic than all the Alexander FuSheng movies but then I did see some impressive Hung style from a traveling Hung style family back in the early 70's. The guys name was Frank Lam but I've not seen any mention of him on the net.
I think the Bat Jam Do form doesn't matter. It's how you train the stuff. This goes for the empty hand stuff as well. The forms I saw has mostly the most basic methods of cutting and poking which are a subset of Southern knife usage anyway (in my opinion).
We used to train the Wing Chun knife against the wooden Japanese Boken (sword). I thought I was OK until I tried against someone who actually knew how to use the Japanese sword. That was a great eye opener getting cut everywhere. Training against people who know what they are doing is always a great experience which is totally different from training with people who pretend to know what they are doing. E.g. training against your classmates kicks vs training against a real 7th degree TaeoKwondo guy, or wrestling against club members vs wrestling against a club that only does this. Of course this is all obvious.
Ray