Making an Authentic Viking Shield, part 4: Edging & Handle

So a day has passed and the board is all smooth but there is some warp as the hide dried nice and smoothly. It also shrank because the remaining humidity left the hide and thus it pulled the planks a little bit warping the whole shield board a little. This is not much of a problem because as you can see this is where the shield stick, the shield handle, the handlebar will be attached to the board and this will straighten out the board again. So it's also interesting that you have this nice flex in that shield which is probably going to be even more apparent and even better when once I have thinned down the shield board even more which is what I'm going to do next. So there is the shield all thinned down with this simple historical spokeshave and I introduced that tool in the first video just in case you haven't seen it. So I lost quite a bit of material which is good because that reduces weight and I have cut off the overlapping edge. I may or may not add an edging to this shield but I'm not sure yet. As you can see the edge is very very thin. I have cut edge strips for my shield using another hide which I have processed and worked much the same way, scraping it down to a nice equal thickness, removing all the tissue on the flesh side and of course preserving the valuable grain side. Now I'm going to put them in a jar with water to soften them before I'm going to attach them to my shield which is waiting over there. So after half an hour's time the parchment is all soft and I think I'm going to take it out of the jar now so that it can dry a little bit before I attach it. It doesn't have to be dripping wet actually. All I need is this consistency and it's going to keep that for a while. Before I finally attach the edge strips I have worked the edges of the shield board a little more. So I used a knife to cut them down giving them an even more extreme distal taper at the very edge. So that's like the last inch or so, two centimeters. I cut the board down in thickness to about two millimeters only and then I used the knife to chamfer the edges. So now it's a really nice smooth and very thin edge which is really good in all fighting with pressure feedback. So like sharp swords they provide a good pressure feedback because sharp edges give you better sensory and tactile information in a bind and the same is true for shields. Some people will say oh yeah but with an edge that thin the shield can easily be destroyed. Now here's the thing we do have ample evidence that shield edges were indeed very very thin and as we have already tested a sharp edge does not really damage such an edge in the same way as a blunt does. A sharp edge gets stuck and this is something that is to the advantage of the shield bearer not so good for the person who has embedded his blade in a shield like that and disarmed, effectively disarmed himself. So as you can see I'm in the process of adding the edge strip and this is what the parchment and the strips look like now. They're a bit damp so it feels like it really does feel like leather like greasy leather or something like this but they're not really wet anymore but you can see I can still fold them easily so that's a great consistency to clamp them around the edge. As you know when you fold them there will be wrinkles this is always the greatest challenge when you add a roll hide edge to make sure that the wrinkles and the folds do not show up too drastically so I'm going step by step so first I clamped I loosely clamped it with like four clamps or so and now I'm going from one side to the other adding glue as I proceed towards the edge with the final edge and the cool thing about the hide glue is even though it doesn't have a long open time so you can't really work it for a very long time but because it sticks to itself as you add glue onto a surface where there already has been some glue before the glue will reopen again and stick to itself and that's this is really cool that's a really cool feature about hide glue you don't have this with most modern glues and as you can see this produces some wrinkles now keep in mind that the parchment has absorbed some water so it has expanded a bit so as it dries it will also shrink and hopefully most of the wrinkles will then become invisible so you can feel how even though it's damp and hide glue is sensitive to moisture because it's hide it sticks to the parchment to the wet parchment instantly so I'm going to put a piece of wood here clamp it I like to turn the board around the opposing side so here we are and the shield edging is nicely in place I have removed all the clamps and bits pieces of wood we're keeping it in place I guess I could have done this after about an hour's time or so there's still minor wrinkles here and I'm now going to use my ironing method to flatten it out and make it even more smooth and to have a really nice surface on my edge strip before I will attach the next part so before I attach glue I make sure that I keep the grain side facing outwards and put the glue onto the flesh side so all the clamps are neatly in place fixing the glued edge strip to the board and while it is drying and setting I'm going to work on my handle so this is the handle that I carved and handles were usually made of ash ash is the preferred wood for any kind of poles like staffs for spears or any kind of pole weapon you use ash and even today you still use ash for say sledgehammers or axes whatever tools still come with a wooden haft now this here is beech it was a piece that I had still lying around so I'm going to give beech a try and the handle is really important to the handle stick the handle bar is really important to give the structural strength to the shield because it connects or later on it will connect all the boards and thus also straighten out any potential warping that might have occurred during putting on your facing now like anything that a shield consists of these things were not particularly big or huge and substantial so this one has a rather slim terminal there are some pieces which have like a kind of a fan shape at the very end and that is flattened out and the handle the actual handle here is modeled on what was found with the trellible shields in Denmark in 2010 I think so it basically has a d-shape so it's this will be the outside this will be the side that is going to be fixed to the board so here is a curve so it it there's a distinct bend and on the inside it's flat as you can see I started to carve an ornament on the shield handle and this one is based again on the shield that was found in Trelleborg and the Trelleborg shield was not the finished ones not completed and here you can see images of the original handle that was decorated with some light carving and triggered design this is a photo montage of the complete handle rolled rolled up into one single image the undecorated parts that the inner side that will facing towards the boss to the inside of the shield and then what is decorated is the side that is the side that is will be visible later on this shield from Trelleborg was not completed and here's a nice here's a photo of a nice replica of this ornament made by Miggel Munstedt and as you can see it does not cover the complete handle this may be intentional but I decided to to go for a variation making the making this center strip here the center of my of my handle and then I'm going to attach and I'm going to add the ornament here and here and this is what I'm going to do next so as you can see I have been working on my handlebar for this shield I have carved the grip the actual handle right now I'm in the process of attaching two rings so that I can later on fix a strap that would go around the shoulder when I transport the shield so I used a piece of copper wire that I had lying around in my workshop I hammered it flat on the anvil so that it doesn't have a round cross section but more of a rectangular cross section I used this brass ring or bronze ring and I created this clamp that holds the ring and these ends the flattened ends of the wire I pushed through a hole which I drilled into into the handlebar so this is where I push it through then on the opposing side I have cut a cavity into the wood because that's the side that will be glued to the shield board so I don't want anything to protrude from here because I need this smooth and even surface so when the these ends come through as they do now they're going to be folded open so that it spreads and I've already done this on this end and then I bend the terminals and clip them to little to little pointy ends which will now be hammered into the little holes that I drilled in here into the wood already so I first need to split this and bend each each ending down so I've pressed this down using a pair of pliers just pressing it into the groove that I have cut into the wood and now I'm going to hammer it flat so that the pointy ends go into the wood so as you can see all nice and flat and here's my little ring that I can attach a suspension belt to all right