Viking Shields Were Built Differently Than You Think (Part 1)

Hello everyone and welcome to this new video in which we are going to be making a historically accurate Viking shield. Now, when I am saying historically accurate, I am not saying that we're going to make something that is approximately historically accurate. We are going to make it fully historically accurate down to the most minor details. So, the kind of wood used in every part of the shield, the kind of glue used, and even the kind of... paint use. We are going to make our own paint, but we'll come to that a little bit later. Now, we do have one caveat, which is the fact that we don't necessarily know everything about the construction of historical Viking shields. There are some things that we simply cannot know from the finds we have. For example, we do not know the kind of glue that was used in historically However, we can do some, we can use a sort of glue that is. plausible for that era. Typically that for us is going to be here simply animal glue. But anyways, let's just get started with the shield itself. So the base material of the body of the shield itself are going to be these pine planks. I have obviously several of them, not only these two, but I only have these two right here. But I'm using pine on purpose because the thing is that the majority of historical viking shields that have been found are using pine for the body of the shield itself because it is a lighter form of wood. Yes there are certain other kinds of wood that are also used but pine is the most common. We are going to thin this down to approximately eight millimeters instead of the current nine millimeters and we are going to have to remove these round edges because we want our planks to sit it square together. So let's get started with that straight away. We also need to cut them down to the right size, because now obviously they are slightly long, they're about two meters long. We're not going to make a two meter diameter shield. I think what we're going to do actually is start with a hundred centimeter diameter shield. So, progress update. I have decorated everything a little bit. This is how I look right now. Looks like my hair is frozen or something. Yeah that's why you should wear a mask when you're doing this because otherwise you'll get you're breathing quite a lot of sawdust. Okay and this is how far I have come right now so we have quite a lot of these boards in total it is 115 centimeters wide, which obviously is way too wide, but I made it too wide on purpose because there are some gaps in between different planks that we need to just sand down to make them sit a bit more flushly together. And on top of that, I have at least one plank that has a crack in it. I don't know how easy that will be to see, but if I separate it like that, you can see there's a crack in that plank, meaning that I'll pretty much have to scrap this entire end plank. So, I just have a little bit of margin to work with now. What I need to do is to make all these planks sit flush together and also just thin them down a little bit more. Right now they are more at nine millimeters thick than eight. But anyways, I'm just gonna be doing that now. Let's clean up all this maybe. So, this is where we are currently at right now, all of the boards are essentially ready, and now we have to glue everything together. Now, in order to do that, we are going to use animal glue. However, in order to prepare the animal glue, I actually have to let it sit in water overnight, so, well, we'll have to wait until tomorrow in order to do that. In the meantime, what we're going to do is to start taking care of the rawhide we are going to put on the shield. So you might remember a video I made in which I made this skin right here in which way I prepared this skin right here now since that I also prepared this skin right here in the same way but then for the third skin I actually end up doing something completely different so this is how it looks. And as you can see, the skin, the hair has been removed from this skin completely, and overall this, the technique I used for this skin right here, is better than for this, for the particular use I want to make out of these hides, being to put them on the shield. So, right now I'm just quickly going to show you how I am making this right here, instead of only that. So let me just show you that. So right here I have the skin of a goat that has just been staying in water overnight. This is just to loosen up all of the flesh, just to make it easier to remove. Okay, so now I've fleshed this skin, so essentially just remove all of the flesh and fat from the skin itself. Now, it's not entirely perfect, there still are some pieces and so on. But that doesn't really matter because we still have another step to do because obviously now we have hair on the skin. We don't want that hair on the shield itself. So we are going to remove this hair. So what we're going to be doing is to put it back inside a bucket of water, this is precisely 10 liters of water, and then we are going to add something in there. And that something is this, which is a lime. And here we go, we have... 300 grams of lime and we are going to add this into our water. Now try not touching this water now, because it's not great for your fingers to touch this, so I'm just gonna mix with a stick or something I just need to find. Okay, that has been mixed now. I'm going to add the skin in now, however I'm just gonna wash it off a little bit, it's a little bit dirty. But yeah, I'm just gonna wash it off, and then put it inside the lime water, and then just mix again. And this lime is essentially just going to loosen everything up, so we can remove the last remains of that fat and flesh, And also with the hair, the hair is going to come off very easily after this. Okay, so now it's time to pull out the skin from the lime water to start removing the hair. Okay, so this is the skin right here, and as you can see, if I just grab a bunch of hair, it just comes off incredibly easily, which is because the lime water, and that's obviously exactly what we want, this makes it way much, way easier to remove the hair from the skin. And as you can see now, it really comes off very easily, just, just pull it across, and it just comes off straight off. That really helps to put limestone in water and just pull it out that way. Okay so now all of the hair has been removed from the skin, there's no hair left, and then on the inside I just removed a little bit more More, uh... flesh and fat from the inside, which was now possible because of the limestone which dissolved everything a little bit more, so it was easier to remove. At this point we have one problem, which is that obviously the limestone that we put on the skin now needs to be removed, Or the remains of it will still have an effect on the skin itself. So we just have to clean it a little bit with water. And then just put it in the bath of vinegar for, let's say, 2-4 hours approximately. So at this point, I have added 10 liters of water to the skin. And now we are going to add some white vinegar. More precisely, we're going to add about 75 millimeters of white vinegar. We're just going to add that to the water right here. And then we're just going to mix. And obviously this is not a lot of white vinegar, however, this is really just to balance out the pH. Right now it's probably a little high, so we just want to balance it down, get it down to something like six or five, just a more neutral pH level. And now we just let the skin rest for, let's say, about two to four hours approximately. And that time the pH will balance out, and then we can just pull it out and dry it. Okay, so it's been some time, so now I'm just going to remove the skin from the water, rinse it off, stretch it out, and then dry it, and I'll see you when it's dry. Okay, so right now the skin is out here drying, and in the meantime what I've done is that I've just put out these planks right here, and what I'm going to do is just, as you can see, there are still a little bit of gap between the different planks. I removed as much of it as possible with that belt grinder, however, I didn't get it completely perfect. So right now, what I'm going to do is I'm just going to grab some sort of a cutter and I'm just going to get this a little bit better, get them to sit a little bit closer together before we actually start gluing everything together. Okay, so at this point, the shirt is ready to be glued together. Okay, so here's the setup to, well, glue the planks of the shield together. First of all, we obviously have, well, the planks of the shield itself, obviously we need that. Then we have the glue right here, which obviously is not ready yet, we are going to prepare that. In order to do that, we have this. Now this is, well, first of all, we have some... Some pre-heated water. The water has been pre-heated to 60 degrees Kelvin. No, I'm kidding, not Kelvin. Kelvin would be a little cold Celsius. 60 degrees Celsius for this water. Now essentially what we're going to do is that we're going to take this glue and we're just going to put it inside the water. That way the water around is going to heat it up and get it to the right temperature, get it to get it to the right consistency so that we can glue everything Let's get started! I guess we are ready to glue everything together now. I hope this works, because I have never glued so many planks together like this before, and I've also never used animal glue before, so I hope this works. This is pretty hard, I need to just keep trying and keep trying to figure it out, but it doesn't seem to work for now, so yeah, anyways, I'm just gonna keep trying. Okay, so I've come forward a little bit, and to sum up, it's been a catastrophe. So basically I figured out pretty quickly roughly how to do it and got these two planks and these two planks glued together pretty easily. And as you can see they are glued together, it is relatively straight and they are holding together pretty well. So that went all fine. Now the thing is that after I did these two bits of plank here, I tried to clamp the stuff together and the weight of the clamp made the entire table trip over. It's not actually a proper table. There's just a piece of plywood put onto this thing right here. So everything just tipped over, meaning that I just spilled out pretty much all of my glue. I even damaged this thing here and essentially spilled over all of my glue, which is a little bit annoying and which means that I cannot actually continue right now because I don't have any more glue. I have to make more glue now. In the meantime, this skin here has been drying, so now it's dry and we have now finished all the rawhide we need for the shield, so that is good. Now I just have to make some extra glue and I see you tomorrow. Okay so ready for round two of gluing the shield. Now this time I have three different pots, three is probably a little bit exaggerated but anyways. This is just because then I can spill over one of them without losing all of my glue, I actually have three of them. So. Yeah, anyways, I just have my water right here and I can just start gluing right now. So this has actually been going pretty smoothly. It doesn't look very nice, because I'm putting a lot of glue on it just to make sure it sticks, so it doesn't look the nicest, but it's going to be covered in rawhide and probably just sand a little bit and so on, so it doesn't really matter. What I've done is that I've glued together these two first planks, these two and these two were already glued together, but I glued These two pieces of two together, so this is an entire board of foam. I'm not going to pick it up right now because this is still not completely cured. Then I also glued these two planks here at the end. This plank here has to get attached to these two, and then I have these two here which I failed to glue together, I spent too much time, so the glue cured before I could stick them together, and yeah, it didn't turn out great, so I'm gonna have to do those two again. But I have to do those two again, I have to glue this plank to these, I have to glue This to these two there, and these two there to this side of that, and I have to glue right here. Now, I have to say that it has been going pretty smoothly, it goes pretty well, I just have to put the glue on on each side, stick them together fast, and then just I just add some extra glue to just make it a little bit stronger, and it's going great! So it isn't actually that hard. Okay, so now everything is glued together. Although I think there is more glue than wood on this shell at this point, but anyways. Okay, so the shield has now finished to cure, it has been cured overnight inside, just put it back outside right now, and as you can see it is now a solid board, it's actually rather solid, I mean there is some flex to it and so on, but it's rather solid. Now what we have to do is to cut a round shape circle out of this shield, because obviously right now it is, well, pretty much a square, and we need it to be a round shield, meaning that we have to cut a circle out of it, so... I just have to find the center point of this shield, which is somewhere here, and then just trace a circle around that, so we can cut that out. Let's get started with that. Okay, so I found the center of the shield, which is right here. Then I put a nail through the center of the shield. And to that nail, I attached a string that is as long as the radius of the shield. And that connects to a pen that I'm just going to use to straighten out the shield. When I just stretch this out, I can then start tracing out the outline of the shield. So I'm just going to start doing that. And yeah, I'll see you when that is done. Okay, so now the shield has been... Traced out. Now, I have to trace out the circle that is going to be the opening for the boss. I have the boss of the shield right here, the boss we're going to be using. So, I just have to measure how wide the opening of the boss is, so that I can match that with the opening in the shield. I'm going to do that now. Okay, done. Now a good rule to follow here is that this hole should be smaller than it needs to be when you are tracing it out, and this circle on the outside here should be larger than it's going to end up being. Reason being that simply you don't want to remove too much material, you can always grind away the material by sanding it away or something like that afterwards. So you can make this hole larger, you cannot make it smaller, you can make this smaller, you cannot make it larger. But anyways, now we just have to cut all of this out. Excess. piece from the shield if I just break it okay huh well it broke at two points but here's what is very good this is a piece of broke off this is down here and as you can see it is the wood itself that has broken on both sides and the glue The pieces that were glued together have remained intact, so this is the piece that have been glued together, and it's completely intact here, which is very very good, because it means that the glue is actually stronger than the wood itself, meaning that the glue is not even a weak spot in the shield. So that is very good, I'm just going to do it with another piece, just to see if it's the same everywhere, so this piece right here. Well there again, there we go, wood. It's the wood that broke, not the glue. That is very very good because it means that our glue, what we glued, is actually very very strong. That's good. Pretty fun to do that actually. And again it just breaks up the wood everywhere, so that is good. It is a little worrying though that I can just punch on the piece of the shield and break it. That means I can theoretically break the shield by punching on it too. Well it is larger though, but still. Not very solid, these shields, I have to say, but I guess that's why we're putting on rawhide on top of that and everything like that afterwards. What we're going to do now is to just sand the entire surface, just getting rid of all the excess glue things right here that we clearly don't need, just get everything smooth. So I should seriously get some better tables, because this table fell, and of course the shield fell, meaning that we got a problem on the shield. We got a crack here. Running all the way down there, all the way down there, which is quite annoying. Like, it's kind of... There you go, you can see the crack. The historical shields, they were actually thinning down towards the edges, meaning that the edge would only be, let's say, around three to four millimeters thick, when the center would be around eight millimeters thick. What we want to do is to thin down the edges. Now it's not going to be a completely smooth thin down from the center to the edge, it's actually going to be from here to here we're staying eight millimeters, from here to here we're going down to eight to let's say 6.5 millimeters approximately, and then on the last third approximately we want to thin down rather abruptly to three to four millimeters. So we have to do that, we have to sand the entire surface on the back and front, And then we have to. thin the edges the edges of the shield down only on the front though because we we want the back to stay flat so we can put a flat handle to it without having any curve in the shield okay so i just finished tapering down the edges of the shield right now we are looking at the center of the shield being at eight millimeters thick i just measured it is uh eight millimeters thick for the center of the shield and then the edges are at three millimeters thick and what i have to say is that whoever thought of thinning it down the shield at the edges is a genius because This shield, before I had thinned down the edges, it felt like I had to be really cautious when I was holding it and so on. It didn't really feel like it could handle its own weight, but at this point I can hold this shield and, you know, use it around and it feels like it's going to handle its own weight. And it's light, obviously, which also helps a lot. Right now this shield is at 2.2 Two kilograms for a hundred centimeters diameter. I'm thinking about just keeping it 100 cm diameter, which is, you know, it's slightly on the upper end of what would be common during the Viking Age. Ideally, I should probably be at around 90 to 95 cm, but 100 cm is still within the historical range, and I'm also slightly larger myself than what would be common to be during the Viking Age. It also makes sense to have a slightly larger shield. And overall, this, it really just works and feels great at this point. It still obviously is a shield that doesn't, it's clearly not very durable. Like, if I just hold it like that and just wobble it around, you can see it wobble like this. So it's clearly not a durable shield. But obviously, this shield is not really supposed to be durable. And it feels and works great at this point. I've also just, on the inside here. I hope you'll be able to see this. But this is from the inside. I have smoothened down the edges towards the boss here. Just to have a smoother transition into the hole for the boss. But anyways. And what we're going to have to do now. Actually, we just have to start gluing on the rawhide on the shield. So, yeah. Okay, so it's the next day. And I have some rawhide soaking in water right here. That we are going to be putting on the shield. Now, it has been raining a little bit, as you can see. And it's starting to rain a little more. Meaning that we're actually going to do the gluing of the rawhide. Onto the shield on the inside, because I don't want any rain onto the shield while I'm doing this. On the inside here we have the shield itself, then we have the glue curing, well not curing, like getting ready inside the hot water right here, and well I'm just gonna bring the rawhide in once I'm ready to start gluing, and then we can just start gluing the rawhide onto the shield. Yeah let's get started with doing that. Now about the rawhide I'm using right here. The rawhide is obviously from goats, so it's goat rawhide. I have not found any direct evidence that goat rawhide was used on viking shields. I have found evidence that cattle and sheep were commonly used but not any direct evidence for goat being used. However I am using this first of all because I have goats and therefore I have goat rawhide so it kind of doesn't make sense to go ahead go ahead and Buy sheep rawhide, something like that, when I already have goat rawhide. That's the first reason I'm using goat rawhide. And also, it is plausible that they did use goat rawhide. There was no reason to not use that instead of sheep if you only have goat. And they did have goats as domestic animals, just that sheep and cattle was more common, which is probably why we have finds of sheep and cattle, but not of goat. So the thing is that for this rawhide right here, we are talking about something that is definitely plausible, but something to which we have no direct evidence. But anyways, this is what I'm using for this shield. So this is the rawhide for the front of the shield, it is just soaking in water right now, and what I'm going to do is I'm going to add to that this. Now these are essentially dog treats, just for dogs, made out of rawhide, and the reason why I'm using this is because, well, first of all it is cow rawhide, which is thicker than the goat hide I have right here, so it's going to be better for the edges of the shield, and This is, well you can get a dedicated rawhide for the edges of shields, however that is more expensive than just using these dog treats, these are very very cheap and they are essentially the same as the ones made dedicated for shields, so we're just going to put those in water, let them soak so we can just undo these knots at the end and then just use that for the edges of the shield later on. Now, time to start putting the rawhide edging on the shield. In order to do this, what we're going to be doing is to just glue it on the side of the shield, and then we are going to drill some holes that we can use to sew it on with a lace. Okay, so I have finished putting on one piece of rawhide. We still have a lot more to do of that, but I have put on one piece already. It takes a lot of time to put on these things, it takes a lot of time to sew it on and so on, but it's going okay. I have actually not really used that much glue, I just put on a little bit of glue afterwards, which probably wasn't ever necessary, but gluing it on and then sewing doesn't really work, so I just ended up sewing without the glue, which ended up holding on to great. But anyways... At this point it is getting late so I'm just going to clamp the shield overnight so that it stays straight. Right now we have a little bit of wobble in the shield which we obviously don't want so I'm just going to clamp it in a way that makes it straight and then after that tomorrow I'm just going to sew on the rest of the rawhide. But anyways see you tomorrow. Okay so it's the next day the shield is out here drying. Everything is relatively dry already however it still has Your hair has to dry a little bit more. It gets much better when it's dry. You will see that, like yesterday, for example, everything was kind of soft. It didn't feel good or anything like that, just because it wasn't yet dry. So it was all full of humidity, which made it heavier and which made it softer. When it's drying, it's actually getting stiffer, getting lighter, because all the water evaporates, and it's just getting better. And you'll see that shift when you let it dry. It gets much better. But anyways, now let's move on to just putting on the rest of the rawhide edging. We already have this piece obviously but we need to put on the rest of the rawhide edging, let's get started with that. Okay so all the rawhide edging on the entire shield is now done, this is done all the way around, well obviously it's not dry all the way around as you can see up here, it is not dry but this has to dry now, dry fully. This rawhide on the shield itself is not fully dry, it should dry a little more and obviously the edging is not fully dry. This is now the outside and this is the inside. At this point all we have to do is to let the shield dry, because we have to get out all the humidity that was in the glue that we used to glue the rawhide to the shield, and obviously the humidity that was in the rawhide itself. After that what we have to do is to make the handle, paint the shield, and essentially assemble the entirety of the shield together. But I will see you for that in part two of making this Viking shield, I will end this video off here, and I And I'll see you in part two. For finishing off the entirety of the shield. See you there.