Viking Shield - How To Make One Cheap!

So I have this old piece of plywood and this old metal buckler which means only one thing. Vikings raised the shield wall. This piece of plywood is big enough to give me approximately a two and a half foot circle. It's one half inch thick but as you can see I've got some issues I'm I've probably had this old buckler or shield boss for about 15 years. I found it in the bottom of a bin that I was setting aside for garage sale stuff. But instead of selling parts I figured why not sell a finished product. I used the simple pin and string technique to get a circle that took up as much of my plywood as possible. I then cut out the center directly behind where the shield boss is going to be where the handle is going to attach with this roto zip using a circular cutter. With that done the rest of the shield was basically just cut out with a jigsaw. As you can see here I do have a couple holes that I'm going to need to work around but I'm basically just going to use a dowel rod and plug that up. Ought to turn out pretty nice. You can see that I just glued a dowel rod in that hole and then sawed it off flat. Don't worry you're not going to see any of this later. It's now time to line the shield boss up and mark all the holes. Marking the holes was quick and simple. Time to drill them out. Quite honestly by this point if you've watched any of my other videos I'm not going to waste your time showing you how to drill a hole. Since I'm not worried about this project being period accurate I'm just going to use this old gate handle as my handle for the shield. It has a good grip and should provide plenty of clearance. The edges of this gate handle are a little thin so I'm going to pad it with some extra scrap pieces of leather just to make it fit a little bit more comfortably in the hand. I put a coat of spray primer on the outside surface of the shield and marked all my stencil lines. I taped off my stencil lines and then began to set in my final coloring. The handle is coming along nicely but I might put one more piece of leather over top just to make it complete. The final colors of the shield are taking shape. Everything's proceeding nicely. I attached the handle to the back of the shield and then where those bolts came through I just cut them off with a grinder making sure that they lined up in the black portion of my paint. It took me forever to decide what I was going to do with the edge of the shield until I finally stumbled across a whole lot of this bluish leather. It's going to work out perfectly. Put some contact cement on the edge of the shield, some contact cement down the center of each section of the leather, and then just put it in place. Now that it's all in place I'll fold it over and tack it to keep it secure. The tacks I'm using are going to be these cut tacks that have a little bit of a rustic appearance. They only cost me $1.38 a package and I'm going to use two packages. And here you can see how I tacked down the edge of the leather spacing those approximately an inch apart. Once all the tacks were in place I went around a second time with a little heavier hammer and smoothed out the tops of each one of the tacks. Here's how I did the final reinforcement on the handle. One more wrap of that same bluish leather held in place by a couple of rivets. This gave the handle the perfect thickness. Time to cover up all those exposed nuts. Since we can't have our nuts exposed, I covered those up with another piece of this leather, bringing this final project completely together. It's kind of like poetry. It rhymes. While I wouldn't necessarily jump out of a long boat and storm the British Isles carrying this shield, I think it turned out rather nice. That metal shield boss really sets this item off. I think the leather around the edges gives it a little bit more air of authenticity. I was going to use raw hide but that stuff is a bear to work with and didn't feel like putting that kind of effort into this shield. The only thing left to do is sell this item. Hopefully the new owner likes it. Hopefully they like the color scheme. If not, the leather around the edges could always be dyed a darker brown or black but that will be up to the new owner. Well, I hope this video gave you some ideas if you happen to have a couple items laying around with which you could make a Viking shield. If you do, drop me a comment below and let me know how yours turned out. Thanks for watching. Feel free to engage in any of those activities that just popped up on the screen. There's a space for all of those down below. Thanks for hanging out with me today. And maybe, just maybe, I'll see you on the next video. If you enjoy videos about the randomness of our amazing world, consider clicking on the globe to subscribe. Or maybe checking out one of the other videos right here.