Ok Ok ..... I cant stay away .... I read fully your posts on the matter ..... and I just realised i was teaching your granny to suck eggs .... sorry about that ..... Ill start going through them and replying now .... not sure if I will get through all of them today ..... You certainly have some intresting points .... there are some diffrences between our experiances .... I have little experiance with a kite shield such as yours .... preferring a center bossed round shield .... it changes the approch in some ways .... the main way of course is that it is much more dynamic ..... it can be dropped very easily and you can keep a second weapon in your shield hand .... A quick stab with a scram in the kidneys always surprises .....

Material

 

The US Army provided us with some armor in the form of flak jackets and kevlar helmets. Of course, one can’t pluck the old shield from the wall and stuff it into the typical A-bag. However, the MFO maintenance boys at South Camp (a couple of Welshmen who did nothing but laugh at us when they found out what we were up to) provided us with a couple sheets of half inch plywood and a reciprocating saw with which we crafted two Norman kite shields (minus the boss). The straps for the shields were provided by a leather merchant in Nama Bay (which was a little pricey, but my friend, Craig, was an E-4 millionaire… unmarried, that is). We attached the straps with bolts, nuts and washers, and we found some upholstery nails to attach scraps of an Army blanket to the back for padding. In the course of a single afternoon we had fashioned two usable and fairly handsome (if you are willing to over look the hex bolts) kite shields. We ended up having to repair these shields often, and even made a few new ones before our six months was up. That’s alright, though. Historical shields were disposable anyway.

 

The quality items that we did manage to bring with us were our hickory wasters. Mine resembled typical Norman swords, circa AD 1066 (with 32” blades, straight 6” cross guards, and 4” handles). One of Craig’s wasters was a bit longer, by at least four inches with a longer grip. In practice, there was really no discernable advantage to the longer weapon; in fact, I found this longer waster to be a bit ungainly, and he conceded the same. Quickness, not reach is the name of the game, as I will explain.

 

Hickory is an excellent wood for wasters. It’s durable but strong and can take a pretty heavy beating. This not-with-standing, we managed to break more than one. Luckily, we packed a few spares. Granted, the rough and tumble aspect of our combats can get pretty expensive, considering that our wasters can cost upwards of a hundred dollars a piece. As an alternative, you can make descent wasters out of hockey sticks, as some of our mates ended up doing, but they are more rigid and, as a result, break easier. Our hickory wasters also weighed more (about 2 to 2 ½ lbs.) than the hockey stick wasters (about a pound). The difference though is inconsequential, considering period swords of the same size would have weighed about four pounds. You fail to get a realistic weight no matter which you might choose to use.

 

More to follow  :icon2:

We use ply for shields .... Marine ply being the best ... its layers are interspaced with tar making the shield much stronger but also heavier .... Doping a layer of hessian sack cloth over the top and tacking rawhide around the edges increases the life of a shield a good deal ... this is essential when using steel weapons .... on average when i was most active i used about two shields a year .... the centre boss could be reused for maybe up to 3 years before it becomes an ashtry ...

 

Your wasters seem very light ... I would find them hard to control for their size ..... did you ever try weighting them to a more realistic weight?

The adrenaline rush of one on one sword fighting is absolutely addictive, and it can also get you beat up pretty bad.  “Having at it” is awful fun, but if you don’t know how to stop your opponent from “having at it” all over you, you are going to be very sore by the end of the day.  Keeping this in mind, I’ll start with some basic defensive principles that we picked up in the desert the hard way.

Got to agree the rush of combat is very intense .... large battles the whole atmosphere .... being charged by cavelry has got to be better than bungee jumping ... exept you would never catch me jumping off off a cliff with some elastic tied to my ankles ..... The adrenalin also has the added effect of protecting you ... more than once i have broken fingers during battles and not relised untill some time afterwards ... usually shaking occors for at least half an hour .....

As for all the other points you raised in this post ... you have made a brilliant job of learning for yourself some key techniques .... somthing I have spent years formally learning .....

 

One point tho ..... Jumping as a defensive measure is/ and i dont think would have been a practical defense .... In full kit I add a third to my bodyweight .. Helmet, Padded gambeson, thigh length chainmail (by the time kite shields were in use they were longer),Viking sea boots ( which dont give you much grip) all the other soft kit, a shield and at least 4 or 5 Weapons prevents running for more than a few feet, let alone jumping ....

More later ... gotta ask you tho ... Have you ever tried fighting somone offhand, that is to say you are right handed and your opponent left handed .... we looked into this a few years back .... after much experimenting no matter what your approch or levels of skill the person who strikes first always looses ....the down side of this is that once you know this, fights with offhanders always become a standoff and large battles often have a disproportionate number of lefthanders standing ...... not because they are better combatants but simply because people avoid them ....