HOW to craft a MEDIEVAL SHIELD for FIGHTING !!! Beginner and Expert tutorial

Hello there, Andrew here and you most probably know me from the historical pilgrimage to Jerusalem I did or from my workshop which is called the Shieldery after which I renamed this channel. And as you can guess from the name it's mainly about the production of shields. In this tutorial I'll show you how to do that. Not the historically correct ones, that's a whole other topic. During my career so far I produced over 100 shields easily and my I'll show you my beginner stage where you don't need so many machinery and advanced techniques and so on as well as the techniques I use nowadays. There will also be a lot of explanation and talking about stuff I figured out in my whole career basically. Please stay with me in those parts because it's important and I learned it the hard way. So let's jump right in with our first step which is the design of the shape. Of course you will have to know by then for which purpose you want to use your shield. If it will just be for display then you're basically free when it comes to the shape. If you want to use it for a lighter battle and combat then it should be quite large like 60 to 75 centimeters minimum. If you want to use it for full contact, for buhurt, for striking it should be quite small maximum 40 to 60 centimeters. There are two basic methods of designing the shape which I will show you now. The first one is free-handed but I assume you want your shield to be symmetrical. So you take a large sheet of paper and fold it in the middle. Now let's say you want a shield for buhurt. Then the tip should be flat in order to make sure that you don't slip if you hit your enemy. Let's make like all in all 10 centimeters so I need to go five centimeters out here. Then what length? Let's say a bit over 50 centimeters like 55 maybe and then in the middle all in all maybe 35 centimeters and now we already got three points for the orientation. Let's say I wanted a bit oval. We got a good starting point for the shape but because we'll have to use this shape a lot to cut out fabric for example I'd advise you to transform it onto a piece of cardboard. The second solution is also quite simple. You just need a circle. Let's not lose the middle point here. As you can see I chose a radius of nine centimeters. I did that because it's easily dividable by three. We'll go three centimeters in this example up and there you go. Most of you won't have a 60 centimeter large divider though. You just need two pencils and a string which you connect to the two. This is the radius you want for a shield that you will use for normal fighting. I recommended the 60 centimeters. Then you put one of the pencils directly into your paper or the cardboard already as I mentioned and then you can draw the circle. Have fun! In shield building you've got three main opponents. The first one is the wood, the second one is the glue and the third one is fabric. If you only want your shield to display you'll only need one piece of fabric or one kind of fabric depending on how you prefer your canvas. If you want to use your shield for fighting you'll need two. The first one will be placed on top of the other one and is a more thicker piece of fabric like 350 gram per square meter I'd advise and it should be made out of cotton or even better linen. The second one we need is a lighter one like this. It only has like 100 gram per square meter or less. It also should be cotton or linen. I'll show you which parts we need to cut out from where, what's important and so on. This lighter fabric shall go completely around the shield. We'll have to cut it quite large even a bit larger than double times the breadth of the shield because it is not pre-washed the fabric so it'll shrink a bit. So let's make one half first. Here we've got the broad of my because the shield is much smaller on the ends than in the middle. We'll have to find a compromise for these ending parts here. I usually do that by taking much less in these areas. The second parts we need from this fabric are the ones for between the wood pieces. Because it will also shrink we'll need more but only one or two centimeters per side. Because we want to wrap that piece of fabric also around the edges we'll need to make it a bit larger than the actual shape. I'll show you how to do that very quickly. First you line it out normally then you take something you got on your body to make the consistent distance. For example your hand. I'll place a second part of that fabric also on the back just to make it look more aesthetic. Aesthetically pleasing. And of course we don't want to wrap that around. So this time will be exact. How to close a hole in the sock without sewing. Life hack! It's also very important that you take care that your shield cutouts are parallel to the threads of the fabric. As you can see if they are not like in worst case 45 degrees the fabric stretches very easily. But if it's parallel it's very resistant. That's one of those hacks I learned like after 10 shields. Imagine how disappointed I was after discovering the results. After doing that let's go on with the part you're most excited about which is bending the wood and creating the curvature of the shield. Looks a bit like a smiley out of that perspective though. I will show you more than one method to achieve that. Let's start with the more simpler beginner level method. You will only need a tension strap like every 40 centimeters of your shield, of your future's shield and two pieces of wood. One of them should be small so that you've got a better closer angle for the shield to bend around and one larger one to transmit the force more equally. Here we go basically. The problem is that the force isn't distributed very even as you can see here. But on the other side it's quite cheap. You can't be sure that the straps are equally strong applied on these both points. If you got a larger shield that you want to bend then you also have the problem that it needs to transmit a very large force where the belt lies. If that's the case you want to enlarge that by using one of these ankles for example and just put it underneath the tension belt. That's not as broad as you'd probably need it for a large shield. That's like 60 centimeters broad. Let's show you my other method then. Ladies and gentlemen let me proudly introduce my piece de la resistance when it comes to shield bending. It basically took me two hours and around 20-25 euro to construct this and now let me show you how it works. We won't create the tension by strapping belts but with a car jack. It should be a scissor one like that and not a hydraulic one because the shield needs to stay while it dries for like 24 or 48 hours in that position. We again put two logs inside here and one in the middle. Let's just check that the distance is right. We again put a smaller piece of wood in the middle and a larger one above. Then we'll put the car jack in. Oh by the way I nearly forgot that uh that's something I learned like after the 30th shield I bent like that. You have to tilt the logs on the side slightly. Let me just bring you a bit closer. As you can see the log it lays on stood up in the exact angle I wanted to because now it lays even. On the other side it didn't. When just a bit of tension is applied you can make sure that it's in the correct position by just lifting it up a bit and now we've got it bent a lot better. As you probably know by now I'll show you how to make a shield on the example of a Buhurt one. Not because it's much more difficult or so. It's mainly because it's just a smaller area where I have to place the glue and so on and then you will have to watch less time lapses. If you want to build a shield for normal fighting though there are only two differences. The main one is the size and the second one is the wood being used. For the full contact shield we'll use birch plywood or birch multiplex. Sometimes the terms differ depending on where you buy it. For the other shield you should use pebble plywood. The two plates in front of me are the ones we'll use for the shield. This piece of wood is cut parallel to the wood grain and it's the thicker one we'll put on top. This will be the inside of the shield, the ones facing you. The other one is much thinner and has only three or four millimeters depending on what you can get. This has been cut out vertical to the wood grain. Maybe you're curious now out of what silly reason that's so important. It's because if they were both cut equally it could split much more easy and the thickness differs because if it's cut like that it's much more difficult to bend in the direction we'd like it to. That's why we'll also put it on the outside of the shield so the radius is a bit larger, not much, but it actually makes a huge difference. Now I'll apply the glue, just normal PVA white glue, and then in order to strengthen the shield additionally we'll put a piece of fabric between them before pressing them together. So that's the first of several times where you'll have to apply fabric to the shield. You'll always start from the middle and press it down gently at the beginning to make sure that no air bubbles will form underneath or at least as less as possible. If we would glue the two pieces together now we would have the problem that the glue wouldn't be able to soak properly into the fabric because it just would dry too fast. That's why we'll wetten the fabric and then massage the glue into it. Whilst doing this I noticed that the friction of the wet fabric slowly disappears and it becomes much more slippery and also you can see that I don't only have water on my hand now but also a bit of the glue. I hope you can see it. So let's continue before everything gets dry. As I said the friction got way less. That's a problem we'll have to face now because if you just would put that into the press now, doesn't matter if it's the cheap or my method, they most probably would separate themselves. There's one easy way to avoid that. We'll have to pre-fasten the two pieces of wood with just some normal clamps because otherwise they already would slip apart when we try to clamp them together fast. After tightening it up only with my hand I can already see whether the locks on the side make the correct movement. It looks good. Let me bring you a bit closer for some nice details. They are parallel too. So two days have passed now. Let's take a look at the result. Oh that's a very good sign. You know I didn't need to loosen the car jack very much. Just like two turnarounds and that's it. Beautiful. So let's draw our shape on top of it and then cut it out with a jigsaw. As you can see I didn't cut out the shape perfectly. There will always be some little not so good parts and in addition the edge is rough and we wouldn't be able to put our first layer of fabric on top of it. We'll have to do some correction. When I started with building shields and serious woodworking I only had these two files basically and used them. If you just want to make one or two shields they are enough by far. But because I made shields professional I bought some tools. Not mainly for that but I bought tools and I can also use them very good for this task. So let me show you. The first one is an electric planer. Also not sponsored. Let's put it on two millimeters depth. Now we only got some small imperfections left and the edge is still quite uneven and not very good if you want it to make on from that point. So we'll use an orbital sander to correct that. Now we can apply our first layer of fabric and we want to create a closed transverse with that to make sure that the structure and the curvature stays protected and won't deform so easily and even if it deforms it will go back to its original shape like that original shape. So let's start. We'll use normal PVA glue again. Let me just put the bucket down here in order to place the piece of fabric at the position we want. We'll just make sure that it is on the same place as the line we drew around it our basic shape and then we slowly go from the middle outwards to make sure that no air bubbles get stuck underneath. That would be very very bad. Let's add a bit of water again. If that's your first shield now I'd recommend you to let the outer part of the shield dry first before doing what I will now show you. Just turn it around. Because it isn't dry yet it can still get loose on the edges. I know how to handle that by now which is just to take the parts with which are the furthest away from the center and just put them very very slightly very light in the middle again. And don't forget to glue the edges tightly too. Put a lot of glue in there. You'll spend like 20 hours on the project as a beginner so you don't want to lower its value by using a bit less glue on important places. Let's start with the front. As you can see we have a massive overlay here. I'll show you how to solve that. Let's press it in on the other part too. Take a bit of glue put it on the inside and the outside and basically every side and then pull it over in the middle. We've got enough glue left for the other side too. And now we've got the sack. We could of course just put it in one direction but then the edge wouldn't be as clean as we'd like to have it. So we'll take the top and pull it backwards and that's it. Now let's go on with the large side here. As you can see a lot of other overlays also form here but we don't have to be as specific as we were at the corners but we still need a bit more glue for those areas. Let's add a bit of water again to make sure that the glue soaks into the fabric as much as possible. Normally it takes between 12 and 24 hours to dry for that layer but today is a very sunny day so I'll put it out in the sunshine and maybe we can already continue at the evening. Have fun till then. Good afternoon! After taking care of the stability now it's time to look at the edge because most of the strikes you will receive will end up on that and you want to strike with it too. As you probably have guessed we'll enforce it with a rope. It's just a basic hemp rope. Not a real one though that most of you already have lying around at home because that's what keeps your tents up. After that we'll attach this big strap made out of linen fabric. This one is five centimeters broad. I bought it on Amazon I think but if you just want to make one or two shields for yourself or your friend to train with it's way easier if you just cut a piece of that dimension of the fabric we will use later. Some of you might think well why the heck is he using this and not just simply raw hide. Basically I don't like the rawhide because if it gets a strong hit and it cracks it will stay that forever. With this technique you can just fix it and glue it back on after the fight of course. If you want to stay with rawhide no problem because all in all we've got the same problem when it comes to the installation. How the heck will we hold the rope in place until the glue has dried? As I said in the beginning my methods developed over the time. I started with simple tape. So first put it on the rope or rawhide as you desire but just on one side. Then let's say we'll attach the tape at the inner part of the shield. We don't have to press like super hard or pull but on the other side we now can do that. As you can see here we go. If you just want to make as I said before two or three shields that's the method I would choose. Now I'll show you the advanced one. Tape is also involved but duct tape. I think that length should fit and then we also need to rip it in the middle. So now we take one of those parts, connect the outer non-gluing side until we got something like that. So then we take these clamps make sure that it's parallel and now we secure it. I made it a bit too long but no worries. If you open the clamp then it's very simple to use. You push it in and then close it and that's it. That was the difficult part. Now let's just glue it together. You should use a glue that's water resistant or at least won't come loose when we attach the strap. So as you noticed I started at the back because the points where we will later connect the both ends of the rope won't be a very strong one. So we want it at the back because there basically no hits will happen. Let's clean that up a bit. Looks much better now. Here we can already prepare the next part. After the circle is done we have to connect the two ends of the rope. Let's cut the overlay first. But because we'll connect them with heat and the plastic will shrink a bit we still need like five millimeters one centimeter of overlap. Let's say one centimeter here. When both ends are melted and hot we'll have to press them together and I'll use this u-shaped piece of metal. After a few seconds we can remove the metal piece. Let's attach our second layer of edge enforcement now. It's needed because after like three or four years the fabric around the rope will rip. Let's avoid that. We'll glue it on with white PVA glue again. It would be very difficult to put the strap in place because it would deform quite quick quickly. To avoid that we'll just fold it and then pull it over a sharp edge. After finishing one side we'll have to repeat that on the other in order to make it symmetrical and to make sure that it sticks to the first surface as easily as we wish. After doing that the only additional challenge in comparison to the rope will be to attach the glue because white PVA glue is a lot more fluid than the glue we used before. We'll have to attach it to all sides of the shield and to the inside of the strap. During this process a lot of glue will drip to the ground. Make sure that nothing gets damaged by that causality. Dang! I know I just said that there were no further difficulties but the edges are a small challenge though. Basically it's a lot of massaging that will bring them into shape. When they are wet they deform much easier so make sure to keep them that way. And now the fold has disappeared. Let's enforce that point with the clamp though. We only want a small overlay like one centimeter at the end so let's cut the excess. And of course here we'll need a bit of glue too. That will now take between 12 and 24 hours again to dry as dry as we will need it for the next step. So I'll go to bed then. See you tomorrow. The glue is dried but we still have some rough edges to remove before we can attach our final layer of protection. For that task a simple cutter knife is enough. Although it is small protection which is this heavier fabric which especially will make the surface much more resistant. It'll be the same technique like you've seen before with the PVA glue. Now enjoy the time it's time for priming. I've got two methods for that. The first one I will show you on the back. You'll just need a normal acrylic paint and thin it one to one with water. After that's dried we only need to apply one second layer of not thinned down while that layer and the layer of varnish I'll add afterwards dries. Let's take care of the leather straps and with their positioning which is also quite important by the way. Let's say that's your arm in the middle of your shield. In armor my lower arm is 11 centimeters wide. We want that same length plus 1.25 centimeters till the hole where we attach the rivet to the leather strap and of course the same length to the other side. You may wonder now why I divided that by two. It's because in order to make it symmetrical we'll just take the shape we cut out at the beginning and measure half the distance then. So the next thing we need is the distance to the front part. Just put your fingers to the front edge of the shield and mark the point where you would like your strap. But where shall we attach the strap to our lower arm? It should be around one third from the elbow. So in my case 21 centimeters. Then we are here. Now the half is 12 and a half centimeters approximately. So let's mark that and with the same technique here we get 10 centimeters. I'm quite right already. Let's put a hole through there and copy it to our properly cut out piece. There we go. If you're not sure whether you like it that way just put some shoelaces through the holes and then attach the shape only to your arm and see whether you like it. If you went with the geometrical option just go down a sixth from that line. So we've got nine so 1.5 here and then very very important don't place your arm like that. You will have to go with a 30 degree angle. If you just want to build one shield or two shields you can buy a leather belt and cut it to the length that fits best. I make the straps myself of course so come closer again. I could have made a difficult template to mark the holes and so on but I just took a piece of paper folded the edges and now that's already enough. Mark the holes and cut the tip and that's already enough to continue with my punch pliers. So there we go. I already did a tutorial on rivets and washers and one on bucklers too. If you're not sure what to do now just watch them. The rivets by the way are just nails if that's a question. Good morning and welcome to day eight of my shooting and I thought yesterday evening yes I can make it today and so I rushed and that's why we now have small cracks in the paint. Well there's nothing to do about it now. When the first scratches will be happening during a fight no one will notice it anyway. Let's drill the holes for our leather straps now. As you can see I added some more holes in our template because when I said you should have a length of hand distance that's the minimum. Because it's a striking shield I want more reach. After drilling the holes we just have to do a bit of a cleanup. I developed my own strategy when it comes to those heavy rivets. First I'll take a normal hammer with a tip like that and then I try to hit the rivet on the edge. Then the washer can't fall off. So you see now that that's sure I can go on with the normal hammer for rivets. You may be noticed that sometimes I lift the shield up and drop it again. I do this to hear the sound and if it sounds like metal on metal I know that the head of my rivet still is in the correct place to carry on. Some of you might be irritated because I attach leather loops instead of leather straps for the grip. It's because the leather loops have some massive advantages. I'll show you if you followed the tutorial up to this point. I assume that you enjoy it and that you might want to watch more of my content, do all the button stuff of youtube and maybe visit me on patreon if you want to support me more. That's quite important for me because it's a heck of a difference whether you do something because you just want it to do and it's your hobby and so on or whether someone actually gives you money to produce something. By the way thank you warclad my only patreon so far. It's only because of him for like two dollars that I found the motivation to produce this tutorial. This is my full contact behood gauntlet. As you can see it's quite big. If I only would have a leather strap attached then I would have to worry about whether it fits. But now I just can put a rope through the leather loops and tada it fits perfectly. Even if I buy a new gauntlet or another one wants to try my shield with a smaller gauntlet or smaller hands or larger hands it won't be a problem. The second advantage is that as you can see here the spots where the metal of the gauntlet with partly yes a bit sharp edges is only connected by the rope and if the rope would rip we can just attach a new one. These are like 80 centimeters of the standard rope we also used for the edge underneath here. The third advantage is if you've got a break on your tournament for example before the tournament starts you just tie one leather strap of your gauntlet into the rope so if you got a break then you can just take it off in one smooth movement and it will stay connected. Let's make our own primer then. First we'll add five parts of chalk of bologna. You can also use the normal chalk or aniline directly. Oh I think we'll need the whole part. Okay then we need three parts of water until we have a nice consistency and then because I feel like it I want to add some pigments which in this case is gold ochre from Italy. That gives it a nice touch. Now we've got in total 600 gram so we'll add 150 gram of PVA white glue. Then we can start mixing it completely. After it rest for some hours most of the bubbles have disappeared and now we can just apply it to the shield. We will still have to apply two layers though. Let's continue with our final step which is the painting but don't worry I won't give you a 20 hour lecture about Heraldy because that's a whole another topic so I will just show you how to transfer any design you have on your PC in the correct size to your shield in a way that everyone can do it even if you got two left hands. Please don't be disappointed I won't make a grand reveal or try to destroy the shield because my friends with whom I fight I will see them in two or three weeks soonest and I just don't want to delay the video even more and the time I would need to build a rig on which I could place the shield in order to hit it and try to damage it which wouldn't happen by the way. I will just start with the next tutorial which will be about gilding your armor and metal in general. So I say so a lot by the way I noticed while cutting. I hope it didn't annoy you please let me know in the comments. I want to use this picture of a Shongawa Paveze I found online as a template. Before we can scale and print it we have to do a bit of cropping though. I just open it in GIMP which is for free so it's good enough. Now let's cut it and then override the original part. Yes so our main tool is Postrazor. So let's open that and load our cropped image. Here we go. So put that out of the way and next step is whether you choose DIN A4 or A3. I'll head to a copy shop later and it will spare me some time because I will have to connect lesser pages. Now we can choose how much overlap we want. One centimeter is okay and now I can change the size. My shield is around 60 centimeters long so let's change the height. Isn't that magical? Let's go to the next step in which we just have to save it as a PDF and done. After connecting the parts you still will have to somehow transfer it onto your shield or which other surface you prefer. For that you use carbon copy paper. It has a gray side and a black side. It can be reused multiple times as you maybe can see. You put the carbon copy paper with the black side facing down on your surface and just follow the basic lines. Ta-da! Now you've transferred your template as good as possible onto your shield. I know I already mentioned it but if I could get like a second or even a third Patreon that would bring a lot of advantages also to you because then you got early access to videos, can give feedback before I upload it officially to YouTube, get some bloopers and god knows what else I can make. You're still there? Better go and watch some other content then. Prost!