Moar foam! Moar!

But its a nice material to work with and is also legal in Amtgard and larping so good to use in many respects. But these large sheets as you can likely see are biiig. And an inch think each. They also come in two inch thicknesses and even more, which I should have picked up, but you live and learn. All of these were picked up from a local company called Box Foam;
https://www.boxandfoam.com/
Who I had been told about before as a great place to get foam like this for making shields. I also think it may be good for making LARP but not Amtgard legal weapons too but thats for later. So when I went to the dentist for some tooth pain, it thankfully wasn't a big issue, I mosey-ed on over to Box Foam to ask them about the possibility of getting some foam.

Starting all 'I hope this isn't a weird question but do you have some foam for Larp shields?' and to my joy they didn't just confirm that it wasn't weird but that they get that question often and were more than happy to help! And so let me through the gate to the back where I found an absolute massive pile of used packing foam that they said I could just take. Wooo! I grabbed a bunch of one inch foam, should have gotten two inch as well but oh well, and headed home to dry them out (it had been raining a bit) and scheme-plan.

The biggest question I had was how to make a handle. Its not wood, what I normally worked with, so there wasn't a firm base for me to use to attach things too. But after some thinking and sketching we decided to use some weapon PVC core and fiberglass fence poles to try and embed the handle into the foam to make it secure. Trying to drill a hole through a cylender that was lined up on the top and bottom was the most delicate part but thankfully we managed to get it down. The holes in the foam are for my hand to fit inside actually around the handle which means there will need to be an extra part of foam on the front to cover the hole but the construction was going well so far!