SCUTUM, building and testing, some thoughts

[Hibernicus]

Fine- semantics. But do you actually mean that the dry wood...

Its not semantics.... wet and damp are two very different things when it comes to wood... damp wood draws the hide glue in more readily than dry wood. The dry wood needs to be primed in a sense. I've always known this...

My practical hands on knowledge comes from my grandfather who grew up learning wood on a farm in Quebec, then at 17 moved to Boston MA, USA to work in a shipyard. He taught me many things about wood working. Other things I learned from a furniture refinisher I worked for about 35 years ago.. made our own shellac, used real mucillage for resetting veneer...

Green wood is so much easier to work with hand tools than is modern kiln dried wood. Splitting for example, is smoother, faster and easier. Mortissing is a breeze. Augering a hole.. less sweat!

This is exactly why a great deal of excess selectivity isn't practical- if there's only so much useful wood in each tree and there's no industrial supply like there is today, it makes no sense at all to expect the kind of selection that goes into fine furniture for a purly funcitonal item that needs to work not to just look nice.

Not true. And it makes perfect practical sense. If you purpose grow wood you can make a tree grow with fewer branches maximizing the amount of knot free wood, cause certain types of branching that will result in stronger types of finished products... reference shipbuilding for example... sure it might take decades or even a lifetime.. You would manage your groves... keeping down new growth of any kind which minimizes competition for water and nutrients, also minimizes the potential for fire damage as grasses burn cooler and faster than brush.. you'd also keep branches from growing too low for the same reason... even the use of grazing domestic animals

And you aren't selecting wood for furniture. Those are two completly different sets of needs.

but, again, if the requirement were for hundreds or thousands of scuta, any significant selection would be impractical.

Of course it wouldn't. But, it would surely keep an overwintering army busy!

Besides, we do not know how many scutums an army needed annually.. What was the general attrition rate for scutums from everyday wear and tear? Maybe a legion only needed to replace 2% annually.. or 1% or 50%... we dunno!

It makes no sense anyway- you wouldn't want one layer to be stronger than the other because otherwise the scutum is weaker in one direction than the other. .....

Different woods have different characteristics, some weaker in one direction and stronger in another. Combining those characteristics to compliment each other, to create a stronger more durable item is a good
thing.

Combine two different woods with unique characteristis and skin them with hide and/or cloth and then set reinforcing strips and you now have a 5-6 layered shield.. very strong.

It seems clear to me that they had the technology and the tools, the skills and the practical knowledge, the time and resources to create such a complex item as a semicylindrical scutum.

How Roman of them!