Actually, just found this...way more appropriate to the discussion. So when my teacher went off on his own to start his organization he felt there were way too many weapons techniques in the curriculum. Because of this he made a separate class, named it Aiki Buki, for those wishing to spend more time with in-depth study of weapons. The movements are altered from their original weapons styles to be more of a training tool for aikido (you will notice some adaptations of stances and maai) than for learning practical fighting with weapons. Our regular aikido syllabus retains an atypically large amount of weapon work, but much of it was cut out and put in a separate syllabus for those interested in more weapons training. Anyway, here is a clip of the opening introduction to one of our in-house training/curriculum tapes.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywSgCsvnsdc