Hi folks,
Well, it’s three weeks until Teonn and today I started to make myself a real genuine fake shield. I got plenty of time, right? 
Anyway, I thought I’d document the process for anyone who was vaguely interested. So here goes!
At the start of this project I decided I wanted to end up with a shield that looks something like this:
After a bit of research I decided to make a normal heater-style shield with a flat top as it will make my fabric covering later on SO much easier, and I have no time for screwups. Having found that the heater pattern is as follows:
(Image from yeoldegaffers.com, a great little site)
I went ahead and made mine as wide as the piece of corflute I had was; which just so happens to be 60cm which divides nicely into 3. So 20cm down from the end I stuck a pin through a knot in a piece of string, stuck a vivid in the string 60cm away and drew myself two bits of circles, then proceeded to cut out the shapes with me trusty scalpel blade (modelling comes in useful! 
) I did the same thing with another piece of corflute, making sure the “ribbing” went sideways instead of vertically for the second one. This meant I had to do this one in two pieces, but no matter. Unfortunately I did all that before taking any pics.
I think glued the two shield shapes together, using most of a tube of Gorilla Glue. Result:
“Hmm,” I thought to myself, “that’s a bit smaller than I wanted it.” However, since (at that time) I was following Bryn’s (from this here forum here) instructions that was going to increase slightly. The next stage was to lay the shield on camp mat, and add an inch to the outside radius, giving something a little like this:
(the camp mat wasn’t wide enough for full width of the shield, so I had to lay the shield across the mat, and again cut it in two bits.)
Now, the plan at this stage was to cut the centre section out of this camp mat and put the corflute in there so I’d have a soft outer edge around my middle section, with a flat section of camp mat in front and behind that layer. I’ve since changed that plan (more on that later)
After cutting out the bottom piece of the camp mat, it looked like this:
I then spent a good half hour trying to figure out how to get two more full-sized shields out of the 1 1/2 rolls of camp mat I had left; because the shield (now 65cm wide) was wider than the camp mat (50cm) I’d have to cut four halves out of what I had left. Adding to the complexity is that the two mats I had (donated to me) weren’t identical; the one you’ve seen so far is your standard blue mat, but the other one had two different types of foam; the standard blue and also a thinner, but more dense, purple layer. I wanted the purple layer on the face of the shield so it’s a little tougher. Eventually, and with a lot of help (thanks Heather!) I figured out that I could do it - and still have quite a bit left over. So, I thought to myself, why can’t I just make three layers of foam, and cut out an inch strip to go around the corflute from the extras? So that’s what I’m doing.
The three foam layers:
(purple one bottom right, obv)
And The Plan:
The camp mats have been rolled up for literally years, and so are kind of stubborn about flattening out; as a result check out my mean-as super-tech way to straighten them:
That’s as far as I’ve got - next step; gluing layers 1, 2 and 3 together, then sorting out arm straps!
Anything I’ve done glaringly wrong?
Cheers,
Viperion
This is the one I figured out how to make. I plan to talk to you a lot (Anna and Jackie and Bryn all have great things to say about you) IC and OOC at Teonn