Here's where you can check out the BC Viking Ship Project in action building oars to row our ship.
These are a collection of pictures from the team that worked hard over the winter building Viking Shields. A lot of effort went into this work.
Our chief armourer, Mikhail Heimdallson, shows off his prototype of the Viking Shields. The design is based on the shield found with the Gokstad ship. To make life easier on us, we substituted half inch plywood for the more laborious butt joined construction of our ancestors.
The diameter is about 30 inches. The shield boss is steel.
© Copyright 2001 Preben Ormen
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Here is the back side view of the shield. The shield boss covers a cutout for the hand. The hand hold is a stout piece of wood that runs across the width of the shield.
On the original Gokstad Shield, the hand hold served to reinforce the butt joined pieces.
© Copyright 2001 Preben Ormen
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The Viking shields were quickly and efficiently cut from the plywood with a router. The router was set up with a simple jig anchored to the center point.
Then all that was needed was to walk the router round the plywood, and presto, we had our next shield body.
© Copyright 2001 Preben Ormen
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Our armourer has quite a lot of experience with the metal working involved in making Viking age artifacts. He made this shield boss in one solid piece by cold hammering the shape from a piece of sheet metal. This took 40 hours.
Since we had thought to build some 16-20 shields, this was more time than we wanted to take. But it was excellent for creating templates for a composite design.
© Copyright 2001 Preben Ormen
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The pieces were traced out on sheet metal and the team started cutting them out. This was a terribly noisy job and eventually moved out of the boat shed to the work shop of our armourer.
© Copyright 2001 Preben Ormen
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The metal cutouts needed a little dressing and sanding before they were suitable for the next production step.
A bench top belt sander came in handy. The North West corner of the boat shed was beginning to get crowded.
© Copyright 2001 Peter Jensen
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The metal cutouts were given the correct curves by hammering using a wooden stump with preshaped hole. Worked like a charm. This is pretty much how things were done in the old days, too.
© Copyright 2001 Preben Ormen
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The shaped cutouts got a few quick finishing bashes on an intriguing piece of home made equipment.
© Copyright 2001 Preben Ormen
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With all the pieces ready, all that remained were a few holes to drill and some metal rivets.
This simplified version of the shield boss takes only about 8 hours to build.
© Copyright 2001 Preben Ormen
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Here is a close-up of the finished shield boss.
© Copyright 2001 Preben Ormen
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And here is a great sample of the finished Viking Shields. The team came up with two traditional patterns in red-and-black and yellow-and-black, respectively.
Quite striking, don't you think? Great work.
© Copyright 2001 Preben Ormen
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