Crafting a Viking Shield with REAL Viking Materials!

Servus and hello there, my name is Andrew. I'm from the Shieldery and today we're gonna craft a Viking Shield replica using only the authentic materials. The wood we're gonna use, as it was written in the museum's analysis, is firwood. But here we are running into the first problem because now we are quite sure that only split planks were used, which means they were like split from the trunk and not sawn. This would take like the first 20 minutes of the video. I solved this problem by getting those beautiful core planks, as you can see here. The problem of those is that they usually tend to split in the middle, so we're just gonna cut that out. The second harder woodworking thing we gotta do is to make it way thinner. Of course, I could do that in the workshop here, but it will take probably a day. So I'm just gonna head to the next carpenter and make it with his machinery and help there. Let's go! Now that's what I'd call a fine cut. Before we can glue the boards together, we gotta take a closer look at them, because every one of them is different. The first thing I did was to determine which side is more beautiful, because we'll only cover up the front, so the backside will be visible. The next important thing I mentioned are the nut holes. You see that? That's a really nasty nut hole. Nah, we wanna cut that off, so I'm gonna put it in the edge. Similar to the next board, because we've got like here a splinter that came loose and we don't want that, too. At this point, you should try to get an overview over the shield's dimension. For that, I'm just gonna use this. You know, it's like 40 centimeters, the radius our shield will have. We're a bit too close here. Let's see what I move in this direction, and we would be off the board. So maybe we can move a bit further up. Yeah. We're ready for gluing together now, but we gotta remember where we want our boards to get together. So I'm just making that X. And now we can see exactly where it's supposed to be. By the way, the reason for this complicated rig here is that the ground on the workshop is quite uneven, so I gotta improvise a bit. Another thing you should keep an eye on is the orientation of the boards, because you don't want them to go in the same direction. Here, like this, contrary to each other, it's okay. And this should change from board to board, because otherwise, we'd have a deformation in one direction. It's not good. What you just saw is one of the many reasons why I don't like those pipe screw clamps. Another one is that they somehow don't get through the pipes here, so I had to do a little trickery here. In addition, I have to put them up a bit, because otherwise, this thing here doesn't make them stop when I put the tension on. All of that cost me like 100 Euro. Looking back, I just should have made a rig which could do all of that, but... Yeah, well, now I got those, so why make another one? Let's test the gluing strength. Ooh, now that looks excellent. You see, it broke right next to it. Smells kind of strange. Be it as it is, the original Viking shields measured only half a centimeter on the edge, which means we gotta remove half of the material there. And the best tool for this is the electric planer. I'm only gonna remove that from the front side, because in the back, we gotta attach the handle later. And if the surface is kind of uneven and bent, we're gonna have a problem. It feels so much lighter now, and for some reason, also way more stable. I think the reason for that is that we've got less mass on the rim now, and therefore, it doesn't wobble that much anymore. Amazing. Now, before we can finish that off with the orbital sander, I think we should take care about the handle, because after we apply the stringing on the next step, it could deform, and if we apply the handle like straight after, it won't happen. It's a bit too thick, so I think the first step is to bring it down to like 3x3 centimeters. Oh, much better. This is ash wood, by the way, also historically accurate. Let's take care of the grip. And of course, the box cutter knife is the tool to go to. By the way, merch. When possible, work from your back. You know, like put your shoulders back, and that's where all the force comes from. Just like that. And you will save a lot of energy and will be much more precise. The wood not making my life miserable at the moment, but well. I'm sweating my ass off here. Yeah, it already feels quite good. I'm only going to make it a bit slimmer now. Yay. The finish line of the woodworking is in sight. That dragged on for way too long, but I'm quite satisfied now, and I changed my mind, because I now think the most reasonable next step would be to directly attach the handle. Just look at it. So beautiful. Because after that, the wooden future core would be under a lot of stress from the rawhide wheel attach and other stuff. The wooden handle would stabilize that and give a bit more support. That means we gotta saw out the hole for the boss now. After the handle had dried, it was time to apply the first layer of high glue on the front. It will really bind the whole shield together, because every crevices we might have left will be filled by that. We use rawhide as a coating, which is basically the untanned skin of an animal or nearly untanned, and it's quite hard when it's dry, but gets super good to work with when it gets wet. Now the problem we got here is that it's a natural project and therefore quite uneven. You can see we are quite thin on this side and quite thick on the other one, which means we gotta soak it for different time frames. As you can see here, I already put that out of the bucket. We wanna put it in the water as short as possible until we've got the velocity we need, because it expands while doing so and therefore also shrinks when drying again. And that would put a lot of stress and tension into the shield. I'm gonna use the high glue again, which I mixed one to four with water, put it in a water bath, heated that up to 50-60°C and waited till the high glue also has 50°C. The principle problem with high glue is that you can't work with it anymore when it gets too cold, because then it kind of turns into jello. Because of that, we only got a short time frame and therefore I glue the hide in different steps. We wanna get rid of the water which is outside now, so just shake it out. In addition, you gotta take care that the meat side is on the inside of the shield where we wanna glue, and this is usually the rougher side. We also gotta take care that no air pockets are left under the rawhide, because the base coat we're gonna apply later would just jump off of that right away. What makes a gigantic difference here is that our hide is transparent and therefore we can see the air bubbles perfectly. This is what you really should take care about before buying it. You can see that air bubble. Press it out. When you look at the surface from different angles, you maybe spot another air bubble, so always try to change positions and see whether you can spot another one. It's possible but quite difficult to remove them afterwards. We also don't want any hide glue at the front of the shield, because it would interfere badly with the base coat we're gonna apply later. That has to dry for two or three days now. In that time, let's take care of the boss. As you can see in this beautiful sauce, some had an edge riveted to them made out of orange copper alloy. The closest thing you can find today is brass, so let's just go with that. Looking at the historical pieces and sauces often can give a great deal of inspiration. Everything is linked in the video's description, by the way. I also want to give a huge shoutout to Roland Watsash, aka Demicator, who helped me a lot with the research. He also got a YouTube channel, which of course is also linked, in which he also made a Viking shield replica and even more tested it with sharp weapons. So maybe check that out afterwards. Because it gets quite difficult to hold it in place now, I think it makes sense to attach the clamp now, the first one. This is the hole I'm gonna use. We've got a beautiful brass rivet. I like try to estimate that it's straight. Push the rivet out again. Then I just got to drill the other hole. And there we go. The rivet's a bit too long now, but we'll just cut that off. And now we're just gonna rivet the rivet with this beautiful hammer with the dome-like head. And there we go. Let's continue to the next hole. Oh yeah, it's much more stable now. Well, I slipped a bit too far outwards here, but we can correct that. By the way, as you can see, the boss is handsmith. That's why we've got a lot of variation in thickness here of the edge. The coating turned out quite good. This is the largest air bubble we got, which is definitely acceptable. Apart from that, we only have some very small air bubbles that stayed. Those won't be a problem at all. After cleaning up the edge, it's time to apply the fittings and in addition to hold the handle in place with some nails. But as you can see, we've got quite an unusual curvature, which means problem in the middle. I think the reason for that is that the fibers, like when you apply water, they expand. It only happened on one side and that's why we've got this now. Usually that gets undone in one day. And then on the other day, it starts to curve in the other direction because then the rawhide shrinks and just pulls it together in the, well, opposite direction. You can already see how it's happening on the edge, but strange enough, not in the middle. This didn't occur with the second shield of that type I'm making. Maybe it's because of the wood grain and how it goes, something like that. I think the boss will straighten it out again, but I'm quite afraid that it could crack while doing so. Now, before starting with that critical process, I want to give a giant shout out to my Patreons. Your support means so much to me, really. I think I'm also going to need a new camera soon. Maybe consider joining them. The link is in the description, of course. Now cross your fingers. Not the most beautiful I've ever made, but it's okay, I guess. I think I'll fasten those two first now, then those, and this is the last one then. But I had to put it in place now because otherwise I could wiggle out of the center of the grip. Such fuckery. I'm not going to flip it and beat it in as I did here. I'm gonna cut it and then use a hand smith washer, which is made by Einer Schmiede. You can see it's already cracking here. Till now I can just fill it up with glue later. Let's see where it goes. Now it gets exciting. Please, mother of God. Till now the crack goes till here, but it's getting way thinner outwards. Maybe it's okay. We got a little crack here. This is something that can be corrected. Yeah, well, still a bit bent, but definitely better. This could have been way worse. We can fill it in with glue later and then just go over it first with a box cutter knife and then with the orbital sander again. The only thing left fitting-wise is to attach that also with a bent nail. You always gotta over bend it a little bit because we want the point of the nail as far away as from your like bending point on the bottom as the one on top. We still got like a tiny little gap at the edge, but I think I can't help that now. I really should have made the handle grip longer. To be honest, never everything gets according to plan. Always something goes wrong. So let's just clean up the mess in a way that no one will ever notice. Except they watch this video. Originally, I wanted to use those rawhide straps for shield edges. But as you can see, the front and the back look the same, which means that the top layer of the skin got removed, which wasn't a thing in the medieval ages and therefore makes those unauthentic. Because of that, I sewed out some own rawhide straps from the scraps we had lying around from that. They are much thinner, definitely. But this time I soaked them completely overnight and we've got an awesome effect on how we can apply them with ease. Let's just put some high glue on it again and also a bit on the edge where we want to place it. Just pull it apart a bit. And now I only got to look out that the distances are even. And of course that we didn't trap air. I think I can pull it a bit more. Yeah, much better. This is what I meant with flexible before. At the moment, it's not that bad if the rawhide doesn't stick exactly to the shield, because when it dries, it will shrink even more and this will press it in place unbelievably strong. What we got to take care though is that when we apply the next strap, we got a lot of overlap, which to be honest, won't be a problem when they are that thin. Also try to loosen up the clamps as soon as possible because those will leave ugly marks. Now the trick here is to wait until the glue gets jammish again so that I can press it out with a bit of force. You see that? Now the interesting thing about that is it doesn't have enough power in order to soak it in again, which means we basically vacuum sealed it now. Because the rawhide is so thin, it only had to dry over one night and it's already completely hardened. I'm extremely satisfied on how it turned out. Just look at that. Perfect. You know, when I started, I thought like, yeah, maybe I'm going to sew it in place or use the metal clamps or stuff like that. But no, it's just perfect the way it is, which is also historically accurate to don't fix it with an extra thingy. Before we can start with the paint job now, we got to apply a proper base coat, which we're going to make ourselves and historically accurate, of course. First, we got to make another patch of hide glue. We're going to mix it 1 to 9, 1 to 10 with water. After that, we'll have to add chalk of champagne, but only in very thin layers in order to prevent it from forming bubbles. That'll take some time now, which you can use to give a like as a sacrifice to the algorithm. You see that? When islands form, you added enough chalk. Now we're just going to have to heat it up again. And sometimes at this stage, bubble come on the surface. The problem is that the surface tension is so high that they won't pop immediately. And that's why we'll just add a bit of water on the surface. And that lowers the surface tension dramatically. And because the water is light, it will stay on the surface until you steer. Let's heat the water bath up to 50 degrees. Then we're going to let it sit for 10 minutes. We got a historically wise problem with that now, because when it comes to Viking shields, we don't have a source for, well, base coating. But to my defense, only two shields got found where, well, basically any painting was on it. And we only have analysis from looking at it and no real in-depth analysis. This base coating has been used in history for every shield now. So you'd basically have to prove that it wasn't used with Viking shields. There's one theory that it wasn't used now because the Viking shield wiggles a lot when gets hit because it's thinner than the bench shields, which will cause the base coat to crack off. I disagree with that because the binding agent, the gluten glue, is the same one as we used, basically with all the other parts of the shield, which means it's as flexible as, yeah, well, the whole shield. And that's why it wouldn't break off, except if you would make it like a centimeter thick. From a technical point of view, the base coat is actually quite good because we're adding like an additional layer, which is quite hard when it's dry. That makes it quite difficult for a spear or sword or an arrow to go through. This has to ride for like an hour now. In the meantime, let me get the eggs. Because we'll paint with egg tempera, I know there are like 10 different recipes, but I'm going to show you my favorite. For that, we'll need a bunch of egg yolks, but without its skin here, because that would crumble and get kind of messy. Let's just move it around on this piece of toilet paper until, yeah, you see that? It starts to stick. That means we can open it up. Like that. Now we just have to let it flow out. Yeah, like that. The motif I choose is quite simple but heavily inspired by one of the two only pieces of preserved presumably shield painting we found. The pigments I'll use are vine black, venetian red and titan white. The last one isn't historically correct, but the original lead white is highly poisonous and I can't purchase it in Germany at the moment. First, we got to mix the pigment and the egg yolk. After that, we add some distilled water to get the consistency we'd like the paint to have. It should be in a way that the brush can soak it in quickly. This shield feels so beautiful. It weighs like 3.7 kilograms. I just weighed it. And before you go to the next video, I got three very important marks. First, don't take shields painted with egg tempera to an event right away. It has to dry secondary because we've got a lot of oil in it and that needs like three weeks. Otherwise, if you got like sweaty hands like me at the moment and you just go over it, you could smear the motif. And of course, like a bit of rain already would be disastrous. In addition, you could scratch it quite easily. Second, you gotta apply a varnish. You could use the authentic linseed oil which would take six weeks to dry. Linseed oil varnish which only differs in like two or three percent and takes three days to dry. Or hard drying oil which is used in the museums to preserve the originals which takes two days to dry and is also way harder. I didn't apply a varnish to those two yet because I want to sell them and maybe the future customer wants another motif. And with a varnish on it would be way more difficult to, well, make that happen. Third remark, watch one of those videos.