This is an article about the construction of a round shield, as used by the Vikings.

I managed to score a shield blank that had been sitting in Garry and Jenny's shed for quite some time, so the construction of this part is not included in this article. I have now started to make some blanks of my own the article can be found here . Basically it is a piece of ply wood with calico stuck on it. Unlike the original shields which were made of planks butted together.



The First step was painting the shield, as you can see above it is rather un exciting to look at at this point. I used a low sheen sample paint pots that I purchased from Bunnings, these seemed to be the most economical way to get enough paint to do the job but not have bucket loads left over. I used black and a shade of yellow called Tiger Stripe.

The patern I used was one that I saw in an Osprey book about Vikings, it was shown as what is suposedly a typical Viking Shield Design.

First I painted the yellow sections, seemed like as good a place as any to start, and I figured it would be easy to cover yellow with black if I made too many mistakes.



Next I painted the other two corners black, as you can see I ended up slipping a bit.



After the first coat of paint had dried, I did another coat of yellow and black, but was much more accurate, this will be noticable in later photots. After I had finished painting the front of the shield I flipped it over and painted the back of it black.



After several coats had dried on the back I attached a leather shield rim. I used 12mm blued tacks to nail on a leather strip that had been soaking in a bucket of water.



Unfortunately I do not have any pictures of the process of putting the rim on the shield, however I do have a picture of a quality new beverage I have recently taken I liking to.



Here is the picture of the shield prior to the fittings being put on.



The next step is the preperation of the fittings, for the center of the shield there is a domed piece of steel called a boss, no idea why it is called this, it just is,it is there to protect the hand and takes a good deal of punishment when used in combat. Also some form of handle is required and possibly some other strapping if desired.

The boss is "dished" out of a flat round piece of steel, I don't have any pictures of this process available as the camera was not with me when this was made. The first picture is what it looked like before it was cleaned up the second picture is an after shot.



I quite like the finish on the Boss, Dad cleaned it up for me using some flailing bits driven by the industrial dentist's drill on steriods from hell. I have since scored a bunch of these bits to fit my Dremel, this should speed up any metal cleaning activities.

Next step was constructing a handle. From using other peoples shields the biggest problem I have found is getting my hand in behind it when wearing heavy gloves or mailed gauntlets. To try and get around this problem I made this one to give more clearance, it will be interesting to see how it performs.



I made the handle from a chunk of pine that I ground into shape with a rasp, the picture here shows it after it has had a rough sanding, it then had a bit more sanding with a finer grade of paper and a coat of black paint to match the back of the shield.

I have another piece of pine that I am making a second handle from, I have been taking some progress photos and have produced a small article on this process here .

To put the shield all together the method decided upon was riveting . Some of these rivets needed to be quite long to go all the way through the handle, so comercial rivets were out of the question. So some needed to be made, experimentation was required.

I was planning on using these bloody huge nails that I found at bunnings for this.



What you can't really tell from the picture above is that they are 200mm long, for non-metric types that is a tiny bit short of nine inches (203mm). They are sold as decking spikes, apparently you need really big nails to build a deck.

After cutting one of these nails down and trying to dome the end over, I discovered that the metal was way too hard to do this, I bashed away at it for quite some time and it started to work, but the metal began to split as well. Making the nails pretty much usless for the intended purpose at the time of purchase.

This lead to some further experimentation, I found two short bits of rod to try out, one was brass, the other was mild steel. I has a picture of the three below. The really shiny one is the nail, the dull one is the mild steel and the orangy brown one is the brass.



The brass was quite a bit harder than the mild steel, while they look like I have done about the same amount with both of them, it took a few minutes of bashing with the hammer on the steel to achive what took about an hour with the brass, this would make the mild steel preferable to the brass. It is also possable that the brass may start to experiance the same splitting problem that I had with the nails before a suitable dome is created.

Due to only a very small amount of the mild steel being available the next experiment was with copper, i managed to obtain quite a bit of copper rod, so it seemd worth testing. It is softer so it is easier to work than any of the materials mentioned above. I have to examples below the one on the left is a test one this was worked cold, it fell apart a bit as you can see. The one on the right was worked hot and then cleaned up and polished afterwards. This seemed to be the way to go, so all the rivets were made like this.



With all the components assembled all that was left was to do was to drill the holes put the rivits in and peen them over at the back. I had to do a small amount of modification to the handle to get it to work for the long rivits as can bee seen with the little bits of woodgrain showing through on the back shot. I later touched this up with a little black paint, not much point adding a picture of this so just use a little imagination.

Pictures from front and back:



And what does one use thier spiffy new shield for? Well, getting out there and using it to block things of course.

Below is an ongoing article to show the shield deterioration through usage:

Shield Destruction




Back to the Re-Enactment Page




Article last updated 02/06/2005