Shield Making

SkollWolfrun

SkollWolfrun

Squire
We have quite a few guides out there for boffers.
My son wants me to build a kite shield for him and I see that some of our MC shields are showing some bad wear in the handles.
What are good materials the hold up well over years of use and are light weight?
Handle designs that are preferred?
 
The best thing I have found for shields is 3/8" corrugated plastic with a 1" wide strip of blue camp pad taped around the outside and then a layer of blue camp pad glued & taped down on the front.

For a handle I've always used just a basic garage door handle (make sure you get the one with two screw holes in each side), though I remember a few years ago seeing a plastic handle (for a kid's jungle gym I think) that might work for the one for your son.

I originally used zip ties to hold the door handle on to the coroplast, but I had some issues with them snapping, so what I've been doing for the last 6 or 7 years is gluing the handle down with gorilla glue and then using a zip tie to secure it while it dries.

I've have the same shield for going on 8 years, it weighs about 3 lbs (with the heavy duty denim shield cover) and other than the zip tie fiasco, have had zero issue with it. My shield sees very heavy use and It has probably gone though 120-130 events.
 
Pretty much everything tieran just said, except I used two layers of thinner plastic and alternated the direction of their "grain" so it wouldn't easily bend in either direction. I also made a teardrop, center-grip, punch shield from the curved punch shield design off the Belegarth wiki.

-Luke
 
TAP Plastics has 4'x8' sheets and will cut them down to whatever size you want (with a small per-cut fee). I found that 2'x4' sheets cut into coffin shapes get you up to max shield size. You can have them cut it in half (4'x4') and then cut each of those in half in "opposite" directions in order to get the alternating grains.

-Luke
 

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I am looking for a better way of attaching my shield handles (leather bindings) then the suggestions of zip ties or glue. Would flat rivets be acceptable on the shield surface?
 
Greimalk said:
I am looking for a better way of attaching my shield handles (leather bindings) then the suggestions of zip ties or glue. Would flat rivets be acceptable on the shield surface?
Click to expand...

Can you link to an example flat rivet? How flat is it?

If you're talking about the surface that is away from your body, I would imagine that they would need to be padded in such as way as to 1) not damage weapons when weapons hit your shield and 2) not damage people should a terrible accident happen.

It could be a sore point for latex weapons, depending. I'd suggest talking to your local marshal/head of rules about it, with an example on-hand so they can make an informed decision on it.
 
If you're going to go with something metal, the method I had best results with were carriage bolts. The problem with any kind of metal fasteners that go through the plastic is that they wear the holes on the coroplas pretty fast, and then the handle becomes loose or detaches. You'll also want to attach the handle before you secure the padding on the front of the shield.
 
myself, I was looking at a combination of carriage bolts and plastic anchors as a sheating for it.
The metal bolts seem to tear up plastic and foam shields rather easily.
 
I purchased some small machine bolts that will be sunk into the face of the shield slightly and then covered over by a piece of leather or 1/4" foam. This will protect the other characters and their weapons. For the back of the shield I am going with nylon locking nuts and then gluing on either plastic caps or a foam cap.
 
Greimalk said:
I purchased some small machine bolts that will be sunk into the face of the shield slightly and then covered over by a piece of leather or 1/4" foam. This will protect the other characters and their weapons. For the back of the shield I am going with nylon locking nuts and then gluing on either plastic caps or a foam cap.
Click to expand...

Cover with a few layers of Liquid Tape. Works great and needs to be cut to be removed (also works well so the nuts don't come off entirely).
 
I make shields that use thin plastic in the cores. I prefer center grip to strapped but adding some straps to the core isn't that hard.

A buddy uses corrugated plastic and says that works well. I use these shields to practice with a few SCA guys we use boffers but the hit pretty damn hard and it has held up extremely well.

 
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