Yet Another Captain America Shield.. for Pretty Cheap.

It's hard to believe that one of my first Instructables was in 2011 and it was the WWII Captain America shield created from the back of a damaged theater seat.

And, like many others, after watching the Winter Soldier, I wanted to complete my shield collection with a proper round shield.

How to do that, without spending a lot of money on a cool spun aluminum shield, like some prop makers have done?

Another Instructable member, Trans4mation, created a pretty neat shield… as did a few people on the Real Prop Forum. So we took some inspiration and went from there.

Materials:

MH round sled. $32 bucks on Amazon, free delivery with Amazon Prime

JB Weld

Duplicolor Metalcast Paint in red and blue

Black enamel paint

Rustoleum orange paint

Rustoleum aluminum paint

Primer

Assorted brushes and sandpaper

Matte board stock

Two "leather" belts from Kmart

Anchor nuts and screws and assorted washers.

Painters tape and newspaper.

Tools:

Exacto knife

Dremel

Drill to drill through metal ruler

Metal ruler

400 grit sandpaper

Leather punch

Lazy susan type thingy

The sled comes with two nylon webbed handles and a couple of nuts and screws. Remove those, fill the holes with JB Weld, let it dry and then sand it smooth.

My trick for creating the grooves in the surface of the shield was to drill holes through a metal ruler at the right dimensions.

The inner circle is 10" so there's a hole at the 5" location. Each ring is 2.75 inches after that. The disc is aprox 27" round so I adjusted slightly so each ring is proportional. The hole I drilled in the metal ruler allows for the shaft of a ball end Dremel bit to fit through, but not the ball. The ruler, being made out of steel, wasn't cut by the ball end bit.

Bolting the ruler to the center of the dish, I was able to just move around in a circle, creating nice grooves.

I also have access to a nice lazy susan type of thing, often used for working with clay. Made things real easy for spinning the disk.

Then I spun the disk and held 400 grit sandpaper to the surface. This scratched the surface enough so that when I painted it with the aluminum spray paint, it looked like spun aluminum.

Ok, THIS IS NOT A SCREEN ACCURATE SETUP.

Don't mean to yell, but I know it's not a hero prop from the film. I used JB Weld to glue the nuts to the disk, then paper to approximate where I wanted the supports, cut the supports out of matte board. (Someone else's amazing spun aluminum disk for reference) and then I cut, punched and screwed the leather to the shield. The matte board is held in place with double sided tape and the screws from the leather straps.

I know, I did not sand off the MH from the sled manufacturer. I was tired. and it really didn't bother me.

The body work is done, things are relatively smooth time to mask off and paint.

I used Frog tape, because that's what I had from another project and it was still good. The grooves are going to eventually get gunked up but I was still as careful as possible, using an Exacto knife to get a crisp line.

Blue first, the Metalcast® paint was amazing. Let that dry fully. Mask off for the red.

Now you may be asking.. what about the star?

The star I also cut out of matte board. I then scored it with the Exacto knife to create the engraving, then painted the whole thing silver.

I glued it to the shield using JBWeld again. Taped it down, let it dry over night.

Ok, we're talking Winter Soldier here, it's too pretty.

Spraying some of the aluminum paint into a plastic lid, I then take a terry cloth towel, dip it into the paint, and brush it on the shield. Hitting several points as if a bullet had grazed it.

This is my formula for grime. Black enamel paint, a healthy shot of orange spray paint, and add some water. Yep, water.

Wipe it on the shield from the center out. We're going to make a mess here so don't wear your Sunday finest on mom's rug.

Let the mixture dry a bit, wipe on some more.

Let the whole thing dry.

Done.