Wooden sword & shield build (walkthrough)

Hey everyone, today I'm going to be making a sword and shield for my nephew, it was his birthday recently but he asked me to make one after visiting a castle so obviously I said yes and I'm just a big kid myself so making a sword and a shield right up my street. So I thought I'd record this one to show the process. I don't really have a real idea of how I'm going to do it so I'm just going to kind of make it up as I go along and I'll go right over the top and just let you know what I'm doing and how I'm doing it and we'll see what comes out at the other end. So I've got an absolute plethora of offcuts and pieces of wood, some solid wood, some ply, all sorts of stuff, mostly reclaimed stuff as well. So I'm just going to pick out a few bits to make it from. I want to keep the shield fairly lightweight, obviously my nephew's only five years old so we can't make it too big. So we'll see what we've got. Here we've got a nice bit of hardwood fronted 18mm ply so probably make a nice shield. I have spoken to my nephew and we've done a slight design phase. He wants a circular shield so I can easily cut one out of that so we'll use that. And then for the sword I was thinking I might just carve it out a bit of this one is a bit of treated 3x2 and you can tell from the grain on there it's a bit older so it should be a bit more stable than some of the newer stuff. Just checking for knots and things like that because we don't want too many of those but a couple of knots on this side but hopefully we don't go too deep. So I reckon that's probably a good one for the sword, nice height as well. He's only five so I've got to keep it small. Okay cool so that's our timber I guess we'll start on the sword because that's probably going to be the harder bit. Here I'm just marking the timber all the way around I'm not sure how pointy we should make it to be honest it's probably round over the edge just to stop him stabbing people like my brother and my sister-in-law and my two other nieces. I reckon come out nice and wide down so we use that whole width down like that. Probably where the guard comes across here I'll probably put in a few grooves here just come out like so and we'll put a fuller all the way down the middle using the router. Guard will go there handle I mean we don't want to go too thick with this. I reckon again come in down don't be able to grip it after all and then we'll add a fuller on the bottom something like that not bad I think it's going to be a bit of a beast that obviously I don't want my sword to be two inches thick so we're going to use a table saw we're going to cut the timber down. I'm thinking somewhere about there so that was that about yeah about two two centimeters thick should give it plenty of yeah plenty of thickness there I might go down there a bit of thickness okay to the saws now we've got the flat piece I'm going to cut the fullers in yeah so it's like the indents that you get down blades normally obviously with blacksmiths it's it's knocked in the blade sometimes it's sanded in the blade like just by removal of the metal so I'll do that on both sides equally as best I can using a round bit and not necessarily mega deep and after that I'll use a jigsaw I don't have a bandsaw unfortunately so I use a jigsaw just to cut the rough profile shape of what we want and then we'll take it to the sander. Luckily last year I went to a blacksmith's and I done like a day where I got to make my own blade so I forged my own blade and made my own handle once I got back here so that process of shaping hopefully will come back to me because you do it basically on a belt sander essentially I'm going to do it a little bit more ad hoc here but uh we'll see how it goes okay so there's our fuller a little bit of you know wobbliness in there but nothing that I can't the routers can be pretty devastating when they go wrong so I'd rather not muck around a bit you know what I mean uh on the other side actually it's perfect as you can see on the right there but yeah as I say I'll sand I'll sand that out to make it all nice and equal a good way of doing this on the wood would be to wrap some sandpaper around a pencil and just literally run it up and down into the groove but yeah that's for a little bit later on but distance wise pretty equal on both sides so now what we're going to do is cut the final profile out or the rough profile rather um using the jigsaw to cut this shape out essentially and then from there we will start to shape the sander there we go fresh off the sander that is looking sick I want one for myself more like a yeah like a short sword good for a five yard I suppose yeah for me it's more like a dagger for me yeah wow that's fun um what a great fun project um so now what I've got to do is I've got to make the guard which will hopefully just slot straight over all this and sit like that over this knobbly bit here and then that will get glued on yeah awesome I'm just going to trim out these little triangles here just because yeah don't like the look of them so yeah gonna do that now now for the guard I've got the off cut from the original piece that we uh this is the off piece here um thankfully it came from the same dimensions as the board so what I'm thinking of doing obviously the length is the same here sorry the width of the board is the same there that's no good for me so I kind of need to use this this orientation so what I need to do is basically cut a hole in this which matches this piece here um and to do that I need to get some very fine measuring done um and then what I can do is I can slot this over um what I'll do is I'll cut this to a similar thickness maybe just slightly bigger than this uh sort of key shape here uh just slightly deeper than that so it will sit on lots of surface area for gluing and then I can shape the handle from there onwards um so first and foremost I'm going to slice this board along just to take them over probably in half actually after this step um that'll be my overall thickness and then see what happens mark here there we have it that should be pretty much the hole that we need to make a guard for this um I'm going to cut it slightly smaller to start with and then gradually work it out um because the last thing I want is this to be too too big of a hole because then it would just fall off straight away it needs to be a nice tight bit so when the glue does connect it makes a nice tight bond and it doesn't just come falling off that is the plan okay so we've got our hole cut out here let's see how it fits just drop over show what that's not bad it's not bad at all um once it's glued I think it'll be okay but I think for a little bit of extra insurance what I might do is once I get it glued in place here um I'm going to probably run a couple of dowels through it so drill a straight hole through gluing some dowels going across it a bit like a handle for a knife I mean those won't make it up really um just as a little bit of extra insurance there um overall pretty happy I'm just going to cover this area in blue down the handle doesn't really matter because obviously it's going to get covered around we'll just trim this quickly beautiful that's where that wants to be so I've decided to let the glue set on the sword till tomorrow basically so then it's going to have a good 20 hours or so to fully cure so I'm going to do this using this very special tool that I've got here it's called a shaper made by Fez tool it's very expensive so I don't suppose many people watching this video for instructions would have this therefore I'm basically just going to do it in time lapse and not really go into too much detail but basically it's a CNC machine but you push it with your own hands um takes a little while to set up it's a little bit slow but you do get really accurate results so what I'm going to do is I'm going to cut out a circular shield um with a dragon um inserted onto that um something that I've designed on the software that comes with it away from here but um if you want to make this for yourself obviously there's various other instructional videos on how to cut circles with routers or jigsaws or whatever um which is I find this is quite this is the simple part of the project really just creating a circle and some handles on the back um yeah I'll just um time lapse me with cutting this anyway just so you can see how accurate it was and the results that come out all right so it took us a little while but we have now got a shield with a dragon on it okay so it's now the next day um all of our made wood glue and uh filler is fully cured up so now it's just a case of doing a fine tune sanding on this getting it nice and ready for oiling and for the handle fitting um also going to be doing some how to work with uh shield so it's handy so so while the oil is drying on the sword um we can turn our attention back to the shield here and so what I need to do I'm not going to paint it just yet on the back I need to make the handle right well it took me bloody ages because I'm useless at sewing but uh we've got our leather strap here not too bad of a job so we've got our leather strap I've got these um little screw covers which might make it look all nice and neat and tidy it was on all right not bad holding on pretty well I mean I can just I get about to get my hand in double holes cut in there stick my dowel through size-wise the other side will be painted so we're just sealing the wood really good yeah so this shield is now the oil has been oiled and uh basically just needs painting from now on so I've done a few coats of Danish oil on the sword here as you can see the blade is one color and the guard is a slightly darker tone and I'll keep on adding layers as the day goes on just keep on building up that color but right now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna mix some epoxy up and gradually basically lay the lace on into the pre-done holes that we talked about so the process with epoxy is a two-part process normally done with weight but because in such a small quantity I just do it with syringes measure it out in milliliters rather than weight because my scales aren't accurate enough and that takes quite a long time so uh I'm just gonna skip through to mixing so the next uh couple of seconds is actually about 10 minutes worth of me mixing epoxy together so I'll rejoin you then okay so 10 minutes of mixing has gone by and I've got a little pot of resin which will go off over about 48 hours it will take I'm just gonna use a paint brush here just to brush it in where I need it and lay the laces and I'll go as I go because it can get quite messy and I want the outside of the laces to not really have resin on I'm just gonna dip the end in just to get it going and just kind of paint the resin on as and when I'm quiet see that it's kind of it for today um unless I can get going with the painting the dragon um in all honesty I'm sure I will um yeah I'm gonna leave that to set that'll take a day or two anyway so probably just get painting the dragon tomorrow and then we'll be done really few more oils and uh yeah so okay an evening has passed the epoxy has nicely cured and the handle uh laces it is good there I've tied on a little um slipping knot here so this basically my nephew can put his wrist through that and then if he lets go of the sword for whatever reason it doesn't fly off and hit someone it's a little uh little sliding yeah so that's the sword kind of done really um I think I will just paint this guard and just I feel like it would look a bit more complete that way and the blade is wooden so um I have portioned off the dragon into segments for painting I've just got these little enamel paints here so I will crack on with doing that kind of fun finishing touches now okay all right so painting is done and dry finished off yesterday let's set a little bit of touching up this morning and here is the final result of our shield that's dragon level paint black edging it's pretty cool I think um and match for the sword I've decided um to paint the hand guard red just I don't know it felt like it needed a little bit of color just to make it you know a toy so uh yeah so we got our and then obviously this is a little bit small for for a five-year-old that'll arm will go in nice and easy sword shield come on yeah I'm just gonna trim that little bit down there but I will be seeing my nephew tomorrow so I'll uh I'll film it when I hand it over and we'll see his reaction hopefully fun project all right Rory you ready to see what I'm going to make for you take a knee kneel down oh that's not taking a knee that's taking a squat kneel down like you're gonna be the dragon slayer take on your shield Rory show us show me your yeah wow right now I'm actually videoing so I think I'd call that quite a success um it was a really fun build um really enjoyed making it so if you are going to make some yourself I'd love to see what you come up with um obviously just look into the world of knife making really because there's all sorts of shapes and styles that we can create it's very similar um from my experience so um yeah I'd love to see what you guys come up with um please share share what you do or if you want any extra help on how I made them and I'll be happy to help you I hope you enjoyed this video and you know me keep coming back um I love making stuff so uh yeah keep it up enjoy bye