Tod's Workshop: He's almost as good at unmaking things as he is at making them

I have my moments

@@knightshousegames Better at making them, the shield was still very much extant by the end! I'm actually shocked that it could have so many punctures and slashes through it, but still remain a single object at the end.

Creation and destruction beling together anyway .

Yeah, it's cool he makes his videos accessible to disabled people, as well as people who use Imperial. :)

Funny, but surely the other way round?

As a Fitter and Turner it makes my teeth ache to hear centimetres, urrgh!!cheers Tom

@@thomasfowles7366 As a scientist it makes me die a little inside every time I hear Imperial units.

​@@thomasfowles7366it fits better in metrics, how do you measure a millimeter in imperials?

Thanks and it is fascinating doing them

@@tods_workshop im a firm believer that things like this need to be more wide spread, maybe then some historical mysteries wont be mysteries anymore

​@@tods_workshopquestion. What would happen if you made the wood of the shield thinner to help compensate for the weight? Would it still be as effective?

@@dakken74 great question

I love that you built a Hussite war flail. Small detail: Jan Hus and the Hussites. Hus is pronounced Hoos, like goose! Hussites are hoo-sights. Hus is in fact Czech for goose !

My thoughts too. Double layers of wood with grains in horizontal position. Seems it would be less work compared to the leather/glass/iron.

That doubling of the weight isn't even with the full shield covered.

@@corwinhyatt519 It is - it's not the actual weight of the shield as it is, it's the weight *it would be* if it was fully covered.

Indeed. Is there a sweet spot where the extra “armor” over thinner wood offers more protection but at the same weight as a regular shield? If so, is hitting that sweet spot worth the extra labor and materials used? I suspect it isn’t for mass production, otherwise more shields would have been built that way. Still, a knight or someone else with the money to spend might have had it done to gain a small but critical advantage.

@@sanityormadness No, it is the weight of the shield as it sits for this test with the three testing sections being of different composition. 1:45 is where he states this. The full shield being set up with the same composition as the red section would be even heavier than the 11.5 lbs stated there.

watching this, lob enough spears and make them too heavy to wield. Net of Spears makes sense.

They did? Source?

From some reason I thought that mail was called that, since it's kind of a net, after all. But it indeed seems to be about a shield. The source seems to be Snorra Eda and the word is "oddnets" so more literally "point net". One kenning for mail is "gǫtvar geirrotu" seems it means "clothing/garment of spearrain".

I think that's a fairly safe bet.

It continually amazes me just how tough they are

Yeah, the handaxe out of everything surprised me. I think it's because that's the one I'm most familiar with, but the situations I encounter it in are made to work in its favor. If you're chopping firewood or branches you're going with the grain, there's no reinforcement to try and hold the wood together, it's what the tool was made for.

it did seem like the axe was going to be the tool that made the shortest work of the shield though!

Great information! And Kraków is one of my favorite cities! ❤ I would recommend a visit to anyone.

very interesting! btw, "In Polish lands at least, pavises and shields were pretty ordinarily made by painters guild (pictores?) not any other one." - "Shield" in Dutch is "Schild", and painting is called "Schilderen" and painters are called "schilderaars" - So yeah, I think what you said might have been pretty much standard across the medieval world perhaps

Please I want Tod to build and test one

@@lotoreo I think that in German sources shield makers are sometimes listed with their own name "schilders" but it seems that in most cases they were grouped with other artists and woodworking trades. Probably they could form their own guilds in heavily specialized, industrialized South German towns, where there were few towns specializing entirely in making mail, for example. But probably not in Poland, or say, Sweden.

This makes a lot of sense as many paintings were done on wood panels, which would need to be prepared specially for painting on, differently from say pieces of cabinetry. Then there’s the carpentry/joinery and carving skills needed to make picture frames, again specialized for that purpose even though the techniques would be similar to those used to make cabinetry or other purely decorative (as opposed to structural) woodwork.

Amazingly so

Adding on to that, even *if* the attacker managed a blow like one of those in combat, in each case it's completely ineffective at causing a wound in the shield carrier, and in almost every case would result in a disarmed attacker. It's not easy getting any of that out of the shield again. As you said, you would be unlikely to get those angles in combat, so I don't thinkt he disarming would be that likely, but still more likely than somehow wounding the shield carrier *through* the shield.

axes look pretty damaging against them!

Shield: I won't say anything, not even ouch!

Got another very weird weapon coming, probably next week

@@tods_workshop can't wait!

Exactly what I was about to suggest. Have it "impenetrable" on that middle section with the grip/armrest, and lighter, but "protective enough" on the rest of the shield. That could maybe cut down the weight down a kilo.

Nice! But actually it was a season two 'brooch' sword

@@tods_workshop which was a beautiful touch and seemed to "fit" with the blade while never being shoved in the viewers face as a "look we did this!!!". Shoved in plenty of monsters faces though.

Thanks and a pleasure

I think if you plan to be fairly immobile a tower shield would be a better bet, but a shield like this might have some niche uses

Do you watch Kentucky Ballistics? That channel is all about the impact. 😄😄😄👍

@euansmith3699 I love that channel! Around the time of the 4-Bore I started asking for a Punt Gun video on every episode. The exact video after I purchased one of the energy drinks that sponsored him, he does a video on the Punt Gun. I was so happy, it felt like Christmas came early.

@euansmith3699 high-speed ballistics is another great channel. The video they did on bullets vs glass was so interesting. Tempered glass breaks so fast!

@@dogishappy0 Thanks for that recommendation👍👍👍Slo-mo Guys do some great blowing things to bits videos too.

What are you doing as a job? Archeologist. That's boring! You have no idea HOW boring it is. Sometimes it's literally boring holes in composite materials!

This is a really interesting idea. I don’t think the iron-glass mixture is worth adding but even just getting a calculation for how heavy the smaller treated leather strip would add could be very interesting.

@@andrewreynolds4949 If it's the difference between an arrow maybe putting a hole in your doublet vs an arrow an inch deep into your forearm, that feels worth it to me. My theory is if you just protect the section where your arm is, and leave the rest untreated, anything bouncing off the boss might not even have the energy to penetrate the rawhide and might even just glance off completely, while balancing the weight nicely, since the heaviest part will be attached to you, so the felt weight isn't as bad

@@knightshousegames I'm agreeing with you. It's possibly worth it to protect the arm area with the leather layers, but I doubt the iron-glass mixture does much to be worth the extra effort, just going by the arrow test from earlier. It seems to me the leather is what is making the difference

i was going to say basically the same thing as knightshouse; it would be interesting to see how the weight-to-protection-ratio worked out if you just used the iron+glass treatment in the area where your hand/arm/body would be [behind the shield]. _So putting the iron+glass mix on the leather in something like a square bit in the middle of that heater, which covered approx half the center area of the shield maybe... with the rest of the shield just being wood covered with the standard 1-2 leather-layers or whatever made the best compromise for protection & mobility (and kept arrows from going so deep they were able to also go through your body armor after the shield perhaps). RE: andrewR from this video and the brief testing we see here it might seem like that added effort of adding the metal+glass-mix was not worth the time nor extra weight added, but i'd personally want to test the whole idea a lot more. Using different shield types, perhaps combining a small metal boss with partial metal+glass-mix application in key areas etc. A shield rarely sits still to be struck flat-on at a right-angle (90 degrees ish etc), and it mainly just needs to keep you from getting hit by a few arrows until you can close distance enough that your proximity to the enemy should discourage enemy ranged-weapon-fire for fear of hitting friendlies. In such a case you might carry a 2nd shield or be mostly concerned with how the shield performs in melee, which seemed like the place that the added durability would be most important. _ _The main problem i'm seeing is not the weight... it's actually what happens if the enemy can use the fact their weapon is stuck in your shield against you to pull your shield out of alignment or physically move you around in such a manner that you are easily dispatched as a result... so maybe trying a different wood and/or glue might make weapons stick in the shield a bit less? -just my first thoughts & 2c

@@Dack.howaboutyou I think there will be an issue with weapons/arrows stuck in the spear regardless of the extra layers of protection. I'm still not convinced the iron/glass mixture is worth the extra work, or that it provides much additional protection, particularly based on the arrow penetration tests in the part 3 video, but the treated leather definitely seems to have a significant effect.

This behaviour seems to go back as far as time - thanks

And of course, you don't need to do it for long. If you just hook the end of your axe behind a shield, you can open it up pretty fast to let someone else use a spear.

@@rianfelis3156 I suspect this type of strategy was what made some battle lines far more successful than others. Working in teams to create that hole in the enemy line. Fighting man to man........your odds are even. I remember hearing somewhere that Roman troops were trained to kill the man in front of the man beside them, not the man in front of them. So as to exploit the gaps in enemy shields(and attention) during the pushing battles when two lines collide. I don't know if that's true but it certainly makes some sort of sense.

The archeological ones found have sometimes got thin calfskin/leather or sheepskin coverings, and sometimes nothing but paint, so depending on what you mean by "overplayed" I don't think you're quite right. Leather is very heavy; even adding 2-3 Oz-thickness leather (meaning 1 mm of leather fronting) to a 90cm shield is gonna up the weight by a pound or so.

Thanks Soren, I thoughts they were always covered - is that not so?

So - not a scholar in any way, but - from what I understand the biggest find so far is 30-something shields from a single norwegian ship-grave at Gokstad, and all of those had paint-residue straight on the wood, which presumably means no covering. But maybe they were just slapped together and painted for the funeral, and not meant for combat? Hard to say. The one found at Trelleborg has apparently been a covered shield, back in the day, according to the Danish National Museum website. I think there's been some living archaeology-historians in Denmark in recent years, who have definitely popularized the idea that they must've been all covered, because it does tremendously help with their (somewhat flimsy) construction. But then again - the sagas are full of stories of shield being split and sundered, so maybe flimsy shields were just how things were done.

A pleasure and it is interesting how thought streams seem to go over huge lengths of time n- one of the reasons I love history

Or, a pollaxe could be an excellent weapon against such a shield. The bottom end is useful for knocking the shield about, the hammer or axe good for smashing it

If you had the time and resources to train for it, 100% would go for the extra weight

You'd have protection on your arms though as well, and if it's only poking through an inch there is no way it would be able to go through your arm armor

I figure there were probably a lot of people who didn’t have solid plate armor for their forearms. Even if I had mail I think I’d want the extra protection, even if it’s just over the arm strap area.

I generally agree, but this was based on the construction of original 14thC shields and I guess they knew what they were looking for

@@tods_workshop Thank you for your answer ! I'll check your other videos to learn more about this type of shield, I haven't looked at finds yet for shield of this era. With center gripped, you get the umbo to protect your hand so I had assumed they wouldn't have switched if it made their arms more vulnerable, but perhaps when the heater shield arrived, bows and arrows weren't as prominent as they used to be and that's why they didn't bother ? I didn't know archaeology had established a common trend in this period's shield weights, I had thought maybe some might have been optimised for dueling and made lighter while others would have been heavier for battle, but if the surviving example share the same weight that's most likely not the case. I guess they just prayed it wouldn't hit the arm rest. Thanks for your passionating videos and very interesting tests I always learn a lot.

Thanks Adam and good to see you here. Unless the thrown weapons had significant mass I doubt they would do much

@@tods_workshop Well i think full spin with a war hammer would do something :P and maybe some spear throw ? Cheers Tod awesome test

The algorithm!

The algorithm

All hail 😆

Center gripped shields were likely first to be invented, and they were predominantly used throughout most of the history (before widespread use of metal bosses, there were wooden bosses reinforced with various ways). Shields strapped to the arm were "invented" for most part, in Europe they seem to become popular around 11th, 12th century. Both types offer some advantages, but center gripped ones were generally way more popular.

As another commenter said, when you are wearing vambraces extra protection over the arm is not required

Not quite. The 5lb shield is just leather covered poplar. The 11.5lb shield has an added layer of ground glass & iron filings in glue, so that accounts for the extra weight, not thicker wood. That is why you have the 3 different coloured zones on Tod's test shield, with each differently covered over the same thickness wood. Would it really be too heavy as Tod said? Well if you constantly trained with it you'd get quite used to it, considering that Roman Scutum & Greek Hoplite shields were even heavier.

yeah, I would have expected that relativly thin wood shield to stop even a spear that good at a frontal assault.

Thanks

But this is based on the build of original 14thC shields

Oh absolutely, I am in no way implying that the people in the middle ages did it the same way or even had the same theories about shield usage. Just saying that (admittedly, from a small sample size) the weight might not have been a particularly limiting concern, vs the cost for example.

Good points Thane Max. This is exactly what i was thinking- maybe putting softer-stuff on the inside would help prevent things from getting stuck in the shield quite as much too (which might avoid the issue of giving your enemy a nice handle they can then grab and use to move you in such a way as to get you killed!).

See the earlier videos in this series, particularly “Making leather armor impenetrable part 1” And “Making leather armor part 2”. To summarize, the yellow section is a normal wooden shield. The orange and red areas have a layer of leather boiled with a glue mixture which makes it stiff and very hard. Only under the red section leather he added a mixture of iron filings and glass, as per an old recipe he found.

With either shield's construction (poplar) I'd imagine it'd be more of a hindrance to the attacker than a help: with one mighty swing they've effectively deprived themselves of (prolly) their main weapon due to it hanging up.. & thus putting themselves at a severe disadvantage to boot, even momentarily - not something one should be attempting to do in battle! :)

@@snafu2350 Yes, probably. But they would have a 6 foot lever attached to something that's strapped to the other guy's arm. (Don't do it against a boss shield tho) The other guy does have his main hand free to either retaliate or slash off the straps, but leather isn't easy to cut. I imagine I'd briefly try to use it to break his arm or trip him to the ground, but if not immediately successful I would have to scramble for my sidearm.

Having weapons get stuck could also be an advantage if the attacker was then able to have control of your shield and/or YOU by effectively putting a nice big handle on you that they can grab it in order to move you in such a way that their allies were more easily able to kill you. _This idea makes me wonder if different types of wood and/or glue might be better able to avoid the "sticking problem". Maybe putting the leather protection later on the inside rather than outside of the shield... and then just canvas/cloth covering the entire thing (for a bit of extra prot. + decoration that would be easily replaced instead of having to re-paint... or maybe repainting would be easier, not sure ;))

awesome

So it seems - agreed on all points

Thanks and glad you like it!

The movement certainly would have a massive effect, but I was trying to favour the weapons here and put the shield in the worst possible situation

That's what the padded backing is for. :) They felt it too!

Thanks

Remember the test was fully supported across the back of the shield. Being held by a soldier it would have a lot more give & flex when struck near the top or bottom.