Shields (Back to the Iron Age)

This weekend my buddy Bryan came down to my place to learn the art of making an Iron Age shield. This is kinda involved process, and needs to be done every few years...

So the first step was to create a stencil for the different types of shields common to the era. a Gallic shield basically an oval 1.1 meters tall and .55 meters wide, Germanic shields which are hexagonal and about 1 meter tall and .5 meters wide, and Britonic shields which are similar to the Germanic in size, but more of a lopsided pill shape (based on the Battersea shield). 

I also started work on a scutum (Roman shield) press designed for a Caesarian era, mid first century BC shield. 

anyway, We started by laying out the shields to get cut out on half inch hardwood plywood. 

(photo by: K. Beckham)

Then we cut the shield shapes out of the wood. Bryan had some difficulty with this at first (he also started on a difficult shield (the British one).

(photo by: K. Beckham)

After the shields were all cut out, the edges needed to be sanded, traditionally, this would have been done with a draw knife, and an iron rasp, but we opted for a modern palm sander. this took time as we needed to taper the edges and round them completely. after several generations of building shields he found that a rounded edge was easier to work the covering over, and it was also stronger. This is actually where a lot of the day had gone.

(photo by: K. Beckham)

Also pictured above is a show (non-practical) Viking shield Bryan wanted to get edged...

The next step was to glue a linen backing on the shield.I was a bit low on line canvas this time, and couldn't really afford to purchase more, so I simply used what linen I had laying around... We took a thin layer of glue and covered one side of the shield by hand. We the stretched the linen as tight as we could across the glued surface. this assured a niche clean backing. some shield makers skip this step, but, I like how the linen takes the paint and wax later and it also helps, in my opinion to laminate the shield to make it a little stronger.

(photo by: K. Beckham)

The glue needs to cure, and we put these shields aside until next time.

To make sure we had enough hardware for the new shields, we harvested the bosses, nails, and handle reinforcements from some of the old shields... Then we had a weapons test... :D