Sheet Metal Captain America Shield

Hello, I am currently a senior in high school, and this was a side project that I made in my Materials and Processing class last year. It is a version of the famous Captain America Shield made completely out of sheet metal. I choose the octagonal shape because it would have been very difficult to make the spherical shape with the resources that I had available, so I figured an octagon was still relatively close to a sphere and it was much more doable. Unfortunately, I did not take many progress pictures while making this so I will be using Fusion 360 to show my process to make it. I will say that most my dimensions in Fusion are not accurate and are just estimates of the actual dimensions I used. This project only took me a couple of months of after class work, and overall, it turned out very nice and was very fun to make. This project allowed me to really understand the process and difficulties of metalworking. But nonetheless it will make a sweet Halloween costume.

Fusion 360

Sheet Metal, 2ft x 2ft square and scrap pieces for the handles.

Painter's Tape

Spray Paint; Red, White, Blue, Black

Sheet Metal Shears

Sheet Metal Bending Machine (can be done by hand)

Plate Rolling Machine (can be done by hand)

Sheet Metal Cutting Machine (can be done by hand)

Spot Welder (can be done by hand)

Clamp

Rawhide Mallet

For this I started with a 2ft x 2ft square of sheet metal that I cut out using a cutting machine. Then I sketched four lines across the corners that made an octagon with 8 equal sides. Then I cut the corners off along the lines. I used a machine for this as well to get clean cuts, but it can be cut by hand.

For this step I just sketched the design ai wanted on the octagon, and planned out the steps I would take to make the shield. I started by drawing 8 lines from the center splitting it into 8 equal sections. The I drew 3 smaller octagons with equal spacing to represent the 3 rings of red and white. Then I sketched the star in the middle. I knew that I wanted to fold the edges of the shield to make them smooth, so I sketched a small rhombus shape on each corner to cut and separate the sides to bend.

I started by cutting out the small rhombuses in each corner with sheet metal shears, so that I had a small flap on each side to fold. Then I used a bending machine to bend each of these flaps to 90 degrees. Then I used a rawhide mallet to fold it the rest of the way over. This made all of the edges smooth and much safer.

I started by using sheet metal shears to cut a line from each corner through the outside octagonal ring pointing towards the center point. This made 8 flaps to bend back to give the shield a more curved shape like the original shield. I knew that when I bent these flaps back, they would not line up evenly and that there would be overlap since ring is technically getting smaller. So, I decided to start by bending back every other flap and then bending the rest of them to lay over top the other flaps. Given the odd shape of the shield I was unable to use a machine to bend the flaps and I had to do it by hand using a rawhide mallet. I just set the shield over a 90-degree edge and lined up the inner octagon of the outside ring for each flap against the edge. Then I clamped the shield down to hold it in place and hit the flap with the mallet until it reached around a 20-degree angle. I then repeated this for every other flap. Then I repeated the same process again for the rest of the flaps and just hit them until they laid flat on the other flaps. Then I used a spot welder to weld each of the corners together, and so that the flaps would stay in place. This of course can be hand welded.

For the handle I just found pieces of scrap metal and cut out two long rectangles with the same dimensions. Then I used a plate rolling machine to roll the rectangles. Then I bent the ends at 90 degrees so that they could lay flat against the back of the shield. Then I used a spot welder to weld each of the handles on about 4 inches apart.

I started by spray painting the entire back of the shield black. Then used painter's tape to tape off any of the sections that I did not want painted with the current color. For the front design I began by painting the outmost and inmost rings red. Then I painted the middle ring and the star white. Then I painted the space around the star blue.

For this I just tried to fix any mistakes made in the painting step and cleaned it up. Then I added some red paint splatter to the white ring, and white paint splatter to the red. I just thought that this added some more originality to the shield and made it look really cool. Then I tested holding it and found that it met all my expectations. Overall, it was a very fun and cool project.