My First Weapons Grade Shield

NO JOKE, THIS IS REALLY WEAPONS GRADE

This is a plain wooden round shield that I built almost a year and a half ago. It is 23 inches across exactly and about 2/3rd to 3/4th of an inch thick, made from a pretty solid double crisscross layer of scrap pine wood. I deal a lot in reused/spare materials and salvaged wood; so the straps, such as the sling and fore arm strap are fashiond from 2 of my old leather belts bolted down with 2/3in thick 1in hex head lag bolts and washers, and the handle is made from some pieces of scrap wood and a salvaged door handle that is secured down with 1 1/4 inch wood screws. The edges were slightly tapered down fir neatness.

Originally I was going to decorate the shield up up and use it as a costume prop, but I never got "around" to it (lol, I made a pun) partly because I was pretty disappointed on how it turned out originally. This was suppose to be a highly decorated Grecian style war shield, but unfortunately with it's small size and the fact the edges don't quite taper the way i wanted them to, it looks more an more like a plain old style of wooden blocking shield that just about anyone from Europe could have used back in the day.

I never did have any intentions of throwing this shield out due to a few minor complications that I had with its overall appearance, instead I decided that I'd use it as a practice weapon to be used along side with my wooden short sword during each spar. To tell you the truth, it held up quite well fir over a year of sparing. It wasn't till a couple weeks ago till I started working on a newer looking superior quality Grecian round shield and a viking round shield that I decided to demote this shield as the new test shield just to find out that it's weapons grade much later (and yes I do mean real weapons); thus began it's serious tests of abuse.

Remember this shield is a double layer of planking pine planking only held together with glue, other than what holds the hardware onto the opposite side, no nails, screws or bolts are used, its not coated in any resin and there is no added protection to the wood planks such as lacquer, not even wood stain or polyurethane, this shield depends solely on its double layer of butted planks and the wood glue that holds it all together. Believe me this real low quality shield too, I'm working other shields that are much sturdier and could probably take much more abuse than this. The overall design being based off of other previous wooden shields, the first layer of wood is designed to take the direct volley of blows and damage wile the last layer is meant to stop any further penetration of weapons, because its wood grain crosses the other wood grain of the first layer, it's meant to hold the entire shield together as well as protect its user from any further harm.

Anyway, so I let a family friend of ours who is an ex-special forces contractor (a.k.a. mercenary fir all you geeks out there), have a go at it first. We strapped it to a tree. He thought that he'd be able to destroy it with his kukri knives and used his full strength trying to do so; but after stabbing, slashing, and throwing his kukri blades at it, all he managed to is bend up 1 of the tips to his knives rather than destroy it as planned. I took it to the next step. A friend of mine had a dad that was into doing archery in his spare time, so I asked him, if he wouldn't mind shooting a few arrows at it. I asked that he'd use one of his recurved bows since they're proven to be the better choice in both hunting and combat situations due to they're power, accuracy, and more compact size. John got out his 60lb fired 3 shots from about 25ft away (in technical terms, pretty much point blank with that bow), and the arrows didn't even penetrate though the last layer of wood. I later took the shied to my basement and hacked half to death with a machete, still no complete penetration, my sister took her Katana up against it both slashing it several times and stabbing it once, still nothing. It wasn't until my friend Josh took the pick to his tomahawk up against my shield that their was finally some slight penetration. Other lesser weapons that I took this shield up against are a buck knife, a smaller pocket knife, and several broken glass bottles. I managed to cut my hand on one of the broken bottles, decide to smear my own blood from my cut hand onto the front face of the shield fir the fun of it (and your probably thinking "Ew! That's gross").

As you can see, this crappy shield I can happily say is weapons grade. Its managed to survive against every weapon that I put it up against with very little or no penetration of the sheild