This article is about the construction of shield blanks used to make completed shields. The blanks in this article have been constructed with 15mm plywood, 12mm may have been adequate however the overall quality of the available 15mm pieces was far better than the 12mm pieces at the time of purchase.

Below is a photo of the plywood sheet that I purchase from Bunnings.



The first step is to mark out the circles (seeing as they are round shields), I have made three blanks from this sheet, two for Tam and one for me. These are in two diferent sizes. The ones for Tam are smaller to decrese overall weight, they will also be strapped rather than centre gripped as she finds the centre grip puts too much strain on her wrist. This means that there is no need for a central hole to be cut out of these two.

To mark the circle I required something like a compass, however it is pretty hard to get ones hands on one large enough, so a spot of improvisation was required. I used a pushpin in the centre, some cotton as the arm and then used a pen to draw the circle.



After I had marked out the blanks I took the ply outside and roughly cut them out with a cordless drill and a pruning saw. The pruning saw cut very efficiently.



The saw was cheap but the blade is reasonable quality, unfortunately the handle was made out of some sort of rubish plastic and I broke it during the cutting of the blanks. This is annoying, but gives me a new project and a use for some of the offcuts, plus the chance to improve my saw.



After roughly cutting the blanks out I brought them inside and did some more precise cutting with my jigsaw. Since this is the first time I ever used a jigsaw I perhaps didn't cut quite as close to the line as I possably could have. There is still some cleaning up to do after this point.



I did some further cleaning up with a rasp and rounded the edges of slightly, I then used some putty to fill up some minor damage. After this I gave the whole thing a light sanding to get rid of any splinters.



There is an additional step required at this point for a shield blank to be used in the costruction of a center-grip shield, a hole needs to be cut in the middle of the shield.

First these needs to be marked, I coloured mine in with a green pencil to make it easier when cutting out.



After this I used my drill to make a starter hole and cut most of the center out with a jigsaw, it ended up a little rough but I was planing on cleaning up with a rasp anyhow, so not a huge problem.



I have a second picture that I took when I was trying to get an example of how the cut was a little on the roughside, the dangling of the saftey leash on the digital camera attracted the attention of a cute quality control assistant.



After this I cleaned the central hole up a bit with the rasp, very carefully so as not to splinter the edges of the ply, and gave that area some more sanding to keep it splinter free.



The next step is to cover the whole thing in something, this could be canvas, calico, leather or probably numerous other things that I haven't though off yet. I elected to use calico because it is cheap and easy to paint on. The calico is stuck on using PVA, and is a very messy process.

I started off by sticking a strip around the rim, making sure it had a fair bit of overlap on each side so it can be stuck down on the sides.



At his point there is an additional step for the center gripped shield blank, the inside edge also needs to be covered. This is similar in theory to the outside.

A Strip of callico is basically just stuck on. However rather than just sitting almost right to start with the material sticks straight out both ends of the hole, as the following picture demonstrates.



This lead me to an intersing discovery, the calico becomes quite a bit more stiff than would be expected when the PVA that is soaking it dries.

After this the sides need to be stuck down, in order to do this neatly it the overlapping bits need to bit cut into strips, I think that "feathered" would be a good funky technical term to use here. After doing this use more PVA and try to stick the little bits down as flatly as possable.

The picture below shows a stuck down side it also shows the feathering effect I mentioned.



This is actually turns out to be more important on the inside with the center grip shield, because while you could theoretically get the outside to sit fairly flat without the feathering it would be impossable to even stick the inside part down without doing it.



Once the edging is completed the front and back need to be covered, I decided they two layers would be the way to go, where as the rim will be generally covered with something and is not as important. The front and to a lesser extent the back are on display, so a nice smoth surface is required for painting and a double layer will help to achieve this, and hopefully let it take a bit more abuse once it starts getting used for blocking things.

This meant I needed eight circular pieces to do the two shields that will be strapped, two per side. To make this easy I folded the calico over a few times and then in half, somehow I mis-counted and only cut out six pieces, so I had to do another two afterwards.

I used the shield blanks to trace around as the two pictures below demonstrate.



There is an additional step with the centergrip shield blank, a circular center piece of callico should be cut out of the center of the frount and back pieces prior to sticking them on, this is marked by tracing around the inside hole of the blank, much the same as the way the outside was marked.

After cutting out the circular pieces of calico it was time to stick them on, first I smeared a liberal coating of PVA glue on the surface.



After this I put the calico on and smothed it down with a heap more PVA, getting any little creases and folds out. All this was smeared on with my hands since nothing else seemed to do the job properly, it was a fairly messy proceedure.



I then repeated the procedure with another layer of calico to take advantage of the layer of PVA that was used to smooth down the first calico layer, smoothing this down with yet more PVA. Once the second layer was on the blank was set aside to dry so as not to stick the shield to my pants. The other blank then got the same treatment and was left to dry.

This proceedure is pretty much the same for either type of blank mentioned in this article.

Once the glue was dry to the touch two round calico layers were glued to the other side of both blanks. I took the below pictures while the sides were still drying, so there is a little bit of extra light reflection. These are the finished blanks ready to be used as strapped round shields once the glue drys and they are painted up



And here is the finished blank to be used in the constuction of a center grip shield.



The center grip shield style shield blank was used in the following article:

Shield Construction Article




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Article last updated 23/05/2004