Making leather shield armour - Impenetrable? Part 1

Now it has in fact deformed a little bit. It is flesh side outward. Just making sure that it's properly wet with glue. We're covering it and then we're on. Hi it's Tod from Tod's Workshop and Tod Cutler here and today we are going to be looking at shields again. Now I did this with the Lockdown Longbow, my my longbow simulator about two years ago, something like that, two and a half years ago and it was interesting because this shield here, it's made of poplar. It's about 15 millimeters thick. It's got canvas and gesso inside and out. It's made basically like a 14th century shield would have been made. But what you need to know is one of the comments at the original time was about how to make the shield more protective than it seemed to be and a guy called Stephen Curtin came up in the comments and he told me about a recipe that was in the Ashmolean Museum that is only, only eight miles from where we are now and this is the recipe. It's a mixture of Old English and my modern English translation. Take leather that is half tanned and dry it and shave it on the flesh side and take glue with water and set that glue on the fire and melt it with the water and then hotly apply it upon the leather on the flesh side of the leather and strew upon that a powder of glass and iron filings that has been mixed together and then lay another piece of the same leather flesh side to flesh side and nail it onto the shield and let it dry and then neither spear nor edged tool will enter therein, won't go through. How very cool is that? So we actually have a recipe, thanks to the Ashmolean, Stephen Curtin, for how to protect this shield and to stop, well it doesn't say arrows, but it says spears and edged tools, swords, axes going through this shield. Hopefully arrows, let's find out, maybe not, but that is the point of all these videos. I don't know, you don't know, we don't know, don't know what's going to happen, let's go find out. Why do I want to find out? Well this is actually really quite important because if you look again at the comments in these films, people are going well your shield is rubbish, the arrows are going clean through and they did, they went through, if you just took a dry arrow like this which has no grease or wax upon it, goes through about 10 centimetres I think from memory two years ago now. 10 centimetres, well that's enough to go through your arm because there's no other protection here, there's no steel plates, there's no mail sewn in behind here, you might think that there should be, but there wasn't. So that would go straight through your arm. 20 centimetres, well that can now start to go into your body and if nothing else, 20 centimetres sticking through the back is a massive encumbrance to where you want to move your shield. You can't remove them, I did another film on that, you see me clumsily trying to cut them away with an axe. So the thing is it's not easy to work with a shield which has got great big things sticking out, you don't want it, but yet they did. So I'm going to explain this recipe a bit more while we're starting to heat up our pan here on our lovely barbecue and we're going to get all our glue and everything up to temperature, all right but it's not an episode of Cooking with Todd, it's not that, but don't forget toddcutler.com, we do loads of cleavers, cooking knives, eating knives, feasting gear, it's all there, it's all available on toddcutler.com, but that's not what this is about, this is about cooking on gas, making some glue and protecting our shield. Let's break this recipe down. Take leather that is half tanned and dry it and shave the flesh side. So half tanned leather, well some of you will be familiar with it, most of you not. On the left hand side we have half tan and you can see the white core in the middle, right hand side we have regular leather and then you have the the outer part of it and the flesh side. The flesh side is quite literally the side of the leather that was against the muscle, right and the fat and that is what in modern terms would be called the suede side. So if we go back to our recipe and you take the glue with the water and set it over the fire, well we've got our fire here and the glue, well it's an animal glue, it is a horn glue, rabbit skin glue, fish glue, something like that, but it's all basically collagen based. It's jelly in our modern world, it's literally the jelly that we eat, that is what animal glue is. And so you make your your jelly, your animal glue, you heat it up in a pan, this one is an iron pan, you can see it from the rust and we'll come to that, and you get it all hot and you put it upon the leather on the flesh side, so the suede side of the leather, and you strew on it the powder of glass. So first of all I am not going to follow that recipe slavishly and there is a reason for this. That half tan leather is it's difficult to deal with. Now if I just paint that glue on the flesh side of here, it won't penetrate the rawhide, I can promise you of that, it'll take days and days to soften that rawhide down doing that, so it won't actually adhere and be tight onto the shield because it has its natural warps and movements. So I'm going to get this properly wet, so I'm going to soak it in our glue mixture. Now there's another reason for that. Now I've done tests with it and you can go online, you can look up Cuyabula and you see people doing it with wax or pouring on water or oil and all sorts of things. Personally I think that's all guff, I think it was done with glue and there is a very real reason for that. If you're familiar with how fiberglass is made, you have these glass fibers, they're not intrinsically, they're good in tension but they're not stiff, they're not strong. You pack that fabric, you pack it out with polyester resin or epoxy resin, that's brittle, it's not strong in its own right either but you combine the two and you end up with something incredibly tough and moldable and you see it everywhere in the modern world. If you take your collagen fibers that this leather is full of and you pack the gaps with a brittle glue, like a hide glue, it basically creates like a leather fiberglass. You can mold it, you can shape it, it dries, it becomes hard as you like. Brilliant stuff and I did videos on that as well, where we're looking at a hardened armor. Look at this, that is a piece of leather okay, leather and jelly. With a three ply, just see what we do and that one may be about six millimeters through, so I'm going to wet this material down and get it thoroughly wet and that's going to take all day. Now we're just going to put our gelatin in, just ordinary cooking gelatin, nothing special, not actually the jelly that you uh the dessert jelly because that's got a lot of sugar in it, it's mostly sugar in fact. This stuff, either pork or beef gelatin, put it in and now you need to get it hot. A bit hotter than your hand will stand but not really hot and the thing is you don't want it really hot because otherwise it starts to break down the material in the glue. So I've just left this material now, this glue, for a little while but you can see that there's a bit of steam coming off here and I think this is what the whole thing about cuia bule, it means boiled leather, is all about, is the people who drew the pictures, it's peasants doing this work, they're not going to go and talk to them, all they see is a big boiling pot or a big steaming pot and there's a bit of steam coming off here, even on a hot day you can see it, maybe not on camera and I think that they just looked at it and they went steam coming off a big pot, they're boiling the leather but actually the boiling of the leather, it just destroys the structure of the leather, this way you make the the glue absolutely as liquid as a leather be, soaks into the leather when the leather cools and dries you end up with this glue collagen leather matrix and it's tough as you like, brilliant stuff. Again, I mean I'll just show a clip here, this is genuinely just a piece of leather and I've used it to cut wood, look at this, so it's chipped it, sure it's chipped it, but that's a fence post and this is leather. I'm going to leave this glue now to dissolve a little bit and then we're going to put the leather in it, but we're going to come to that for in a while, but the next one is powdered glass. I have a feeling that I'm going to regret using powdered glass, but it specifically says it, so I've made myself a mortar, steel not brass, I don't suppose that matters, I'm going to crush the glass, well to a powder, that's all it says, it doesn't give any indication of how big that should be. Got some old bottles, got my mortise, well I'm just going to have a go, I've never done it before either, so powdered glass, here we come. I'm thinking a bit of health and safety might be in order. Wow, that's tough. Well, I think I may have fallen off the first hurdle, that is incredibly tough and there we have it, so not that powdered. I'm also going to put the very noisy extractor fan on because I'm not feeling very good about this really. Anyway, technique change, we'll get there in the end. It's getting better, I guess I'll just sieve it really, I'll carry on as I am. So I've smashed my glass up and I'm going to sieve that in a minute, but in the meantime now our glue is up to temperature, so I'm going to start to get this leather in. Now obviously it's a little bit bigger than the pan, hopefully with a bit of, you can hear it now, that is what half tan is about. It's amazing stuff, so hopefully that's all going to soften down and actually, well, fit in the pan sooner or later. There we go, so it's going to take, even at this temperature, it's going to take, I don't know, 10-15 minutes I would have thought before I can even fold it back in. It's like getting pasta into a pan. Anyway, we'll deal with that in a bit. So we're going to sieve the glass now, but I'm going to do that with my mask back on. All right, it's pretty. So it's a mixture of slightly larger chunks and powder, pretty much as I would expect it to come out of a mortise. I'm just going to go wash my hands now. So it's very specific here that it is iron filings and glass powder, so they've really tried to achieve something very specific with this recipe and it is a composite armour and it is many layers. So if we think about what it's going to be like, if we take our shield by the time it'll be finished, you have got on the outside, you've got, well, somewhere between a soft and a hard leather with with the glue impregnation, then you've got rawhide, then you've got the leather layer again, then you have the glass, glue and iron composite layer, then you've got the softer leather, then you've got the rawhide, then you've got the softer leather again, then you've got 15 mil of poplar and you've got a layer, for what it's worth, of canvas and gesso on the inside. That is a lot of layers with different properties this arrow, spear, axe has got to get through. I am fascinated to find out if it works and what the hell they were getting at. So I'm going to work a little bit quickly now and so I've got Jenny here who's going to help out basically just handling things as we go through. Now I'm going to take the first bit of leather out and we're going to nail it onto our shield. Now it has in fact deformed a little bit because I got it too hot, that's exactly the problem with boiling leather. So we're going to see if we can take that out. So this flesh side, oh slimy stuff, it is flesh side outward because that is the side that we are going to stick our powder of iron and glass onto. Let's do the middle. So I'm just tacking this down at the moment and then once this is all sort of done and in place, let's spin that around, then okay I'm going to have to, I've messed up, I've messed up, I'm going to have to put a cut in that to get it down back in a minute. This is really annoying because actually it's exactly this that I didn't want to do but we've just got it, I'm going to have to put a little dart in there, it's really annoying. Anyway, although I suppose this is exactly the sort of problems that they would have faced but they would have had some little boy there sitting there stirring it instead of me who was actually going off to do some functional work. Anyway, let's get that. So we will have to bear that in mind if we get any strikes on exactly that area there. I'm just going to try and pin it down as best I can. So we have our leather down onto the shield now and as you can tell that was hard enough actually, even though it's softened off, it's been in there for about an hour, an hour and a half. So now we're going to smear it with glue and then we're going to strew it with our powder as per the recipe. So this is cooling down now and actually that means that all the jelly is sort of stiffening up. You can warm it over a fire a little bit and that will warm it again. But anyway, now we're just making sure that it's properly wet with glue. So this is a little bit stronger than what I've soaked it in, so this is more akin to what you'd use on furniture or something like that. And then we're covering it with our mixture. I don't know how thick to do it, so I suppose it's probably a bit like, you know, when you're a kid doing glitter, you put a load on then you shake it off and what's off is off. Oh, if you're British I'm just going to say blue Peter at you, you'll know exactly what I mean. Right, well actually that's worthy of showing to camera. Look at that for a mess. So we've got the top half of the shield which is covered in our first layer of leather and then a layer of this glass and iron, well, mixture. Our next piece of leather, just going to move that well out of the way, and this one we're going to nail all around the perimeter. So this piece of leather now is flat. Now remember, according to the recipe, it is flesh side inward again. So I'm just going to make sure we've got nice good gloopy glue on and then we're on. So, oh I'm already getting cut. Right then, let's go. Oh god, this is just one big mess I can tell you. If this is actually what they did, I would not want to be a professional shield maker because you would have a million leather cuts, uh, glass cuts. About to abandon the gloves, can't do it, everything's just gone too sticky. This is what I do for you. So I've nailed all the way around the outside, but the thing is this is sort of a dry powder mix that's gone in and there's glue there and everything. I don't know how it's going to stand up to being jiggled about, you know, riding on a horse. The recipe doesn't say either, but what I'm going to do is I'm going to put in a few more nails just to help pin it all down. And that is that. Thank you very much Jenny. Um, excuse me while I go and wash my hands. So we've finished this stage of our making. So we have a shield which is canvas backed, 15 millimeter poplar in this case, could be limewood, both good traditional woods for shields, but they're tough and they're light, not oak, not ash, and that means of course historically without any other armoring on it, arrows can go through. I've shown that, I showed that before with the lockdown longbow, certainly with like viking shields and stuff like that, they didn't do this necessarily, but again shields are not, they are not impenetrable things. They help you, they don't solve all your problems. This, according to our 13th, 14th century recipe from the Ashmolean Museum, does solve all your problems. That is a big boast. No spear, no edged tool will go through this apparently. Well you know what, the lockdown longbow is coming back in the 160 pound variety and the 120 pound variety and we're going to see if it can send longbow arrows through this, but that'll be a few weeks away yet because we've got to cover it in canvas, you know, I've got to get it all dressed up, I've got to get it finished as a shield, but just make sure you don't miss it. So sign up for the channel, turn your bell notifications on and while you're at it, come down to the websites and buy amazing stuff. You will love it because it is everything that you are interested in. It is history and it is science and it is tools. Anyway, I'll see you again another time. Cheers.