I am pleased to announce that Legio IX Hispana,(USA) will be abondoning all modern plywood scutums over the next 15 months and that the southern California chapters will have discarded all plywod shields within 3 months.
We will be making all of our scutums from 3 layers of cross laminated wood strips glued with hide glue, covered in hide and/or linen and painted with lime/milk paint.
We introduced 7 new scutums at MTHE (a military timeline event) near Los Angeles California, Oct 21-22, 2006.
A few teaser pics can be seen on our yahoo group page
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/TheLegioIXHispanaGroup/
We'll soon be posting a large "how we made them" section on our main webpage including a section of what not to do!
We'll also be offering scutum blanks, customized to your dimensions on rlqm.com
Wow, I made one of those about a year ago for a client and am going to start on 3 more of these completely authentic scuta before too long- I had no idea anyone else was even considering trying it. They're very cool, eh?
wink:
We'll have blanks available in just about any configuration and wood combination someone might want.
Availble as :
- a raw blank.. you trim and finish
- a finished blank, trimmed to your specs, planed and sanded.
- a skinned finished blank
- a complete scutum ready to paint
Can I have one of the old plywood ones? Hah!
what is the difference in weight? Are the plywood one lighter? Are the luan ones lighter? are the new ones lighter?
The historicaly accurate scutums weigh about the same as the three layer luan that we used to make... round about 20 pounds.. trick is in the planing and sanding.. tapering the sides and edges..
We have some 2 ply that we were making up for the public to use so they could march with us at displays. Very light, coming in at about 13 pounds.
I have a geezer, goes by the name Halituscanininus, and we're making an historic style scutum for him but we're going to make the strips thinner to start with and sand off lots more than usual after its glued up. The man drives a desk for a living. What's a Centurio to do!
I can't wait to shoot at one with a musket! Just how close could we get to an company of Yankees before the scutum would be compromised? Close enough to take one volley and then be among them before they could get that second shot off?
The new scuta are great...the "feel" is important for me since I enjoy gaining a better understanding about how it felt to be a legionary. They must have gone to battle confident under most ancint-era missle fire and spear thrusts (athough seige engine fire would be another story...)
Compared to luan its heavy...but that's like comparing a parade scuta to a battle-ready scuta! Which would you trust you're life to?!? Three cheers to Hibernicus for being the catalyst for this great improvement in our group!
Micarius
And us east coast members just can't wait to get our hands on one!
Calvus
It's great to see an advance like that! I'm frankly envious. But I'm also a little puzzled by the thickness and weight. From the evidence I've seen a finished weight of around 15 pounds or a little less is about right. If you cut the strips c. 3/32" thick instead of 5/32", the thickness and weight would be more accurate.
I always thought it would be handy to find a source of split strips, rather than sawn ones. They wouldn't be as consistent in thickness, but that would be useful. Use the thicker ones for the middle of each layer, with thinner ones towards the edges (or top/bottom). That way you'd have a naturally tapered board, thicker in the middle than at the edges. Very accurate, lighter, yet strongest in the center. The handling would be different, too. But I seem to remember that the strips of the Dura Europas shields still had saw marks on them, indicating that they were sawn rather than split--can anyone with the Dura report confirm that?
Valete,
Matthew
sawn strips on Dura?
Weight varies. We're still working on planing and tapering, but with hide skin, umbo etc etc weight starts hanging out at about 20lbs
Ought to have a Repub blank next week!
Quote:It's great to see an advance like that! I'm frankly envious. But I'm also a little puzzled by the thickness and weight. From the evidence I've seen a finished weight of around 15 pounds or a little less is about right. If you cut the strips c. 3/32" thick instead of 5/32", the thickness and weight would be more accurate.
I seem to remember that the strips of the Dura Europas shields still had saw marks on them, indicating that they were sawn rather than split--can anyone with the Dura report confirm that?
Good old Tarby just sent me a little of it and yes, it does refer to sawmarks on some of the strips. The suggestion is also that the outer face of the shields was worked smooth but the inner left rough, so it seems reasonable that thinning towards the edges could have been done post-assembly as opposed to using different thickness strips during assembly. That's the way I did my first one and it seems quite a good method.
As for weight, I found mine heavy too- remember there's not only the wood but a LOT of glue- I can't recall just how much I ended up having to use but it was nearly 1kg- 2.2lbs (including that necessary for attaching the linen and skin layers). Then as Sean says, add a steel umbo, and so on and you get a fairly heavy piece. Mine ranges from about 9mm in the middle (without outer layers), to 7mm at the sides. The Dura report mentions strips ranging from ~1mm up to 3mm, so it seems reasonable to me to think there could have been scuta as thick as 9mm (pre-planing). I'm sure I once measured one diagram of a piece of edging to be about that too. I don't know just how much my shield weighs- I don't have a scale- but it's not appreciably heavier than my 3/8" plywood one.
The next couple I'm making will be a bit thinner though I think- I plan to make all the strips about 2mm thick, so the center will be 6mm and the edges planed down to more like 4mm- I guess I'll see if that makes any appreciable difference in weight (to hold that is)...
A bit math:
The weight of 1 cubic meters of birch wood is approximately 770 kg or 1540 lbs
So if you make a shield with a dimensions of
100*80*0,5 cm then the weight will be 3,08 kg or 6,776 lbs
100*80*0,6 cm then the weight will be 3,69 kg or 8,131 lbs
100*80*0,7 cm then the weight will be 4,31 kg or 9,482 lbs
100*80*0,8 cm then the weight will be 4,93 kg or 10,846 lbs
100*80*0,9 cm then the weight will be 5,54 kg or 12,188 lbs
100*80*1,0 cm then the weight will be 6,00 kg or 13,2 lbs
this is the base add the weight of the accessories (umbo, leather, glue etc) and here you go, you got the total weight
By the way, as far as I can remember the weight of the Dura Europos scutum reconstruction was about 6 kg (but maybe my memories cheat me).
Except that density is related to moisture content (mc) and that's variable. I find a density rating of 506 kg/m3 for green birch and 571 kg/m3 for it dry (air dry- no mc listed) and 641 kg/m3 for 12% mc. Yours of 770 kg/m3 must be kiln dried. So, unfortunately, just doing math isn't as easy as it might seem
Not to mention that it was the Fayum scutum that was birch, the Dura scutum was Sycamore (Planewood). I use birch myself.
So we're just going to have to measure these guys- and even then without a common, calibrated scale the data won't be particularly valid :lol: It'd only be applicable as a general thing...