In light of be_slinger and Klarth's recent posts on making cordage and slings from that most ubiquitous of urban survival materials, I'd like to suggest/announce/sponsor the first slinging.org plastic bag challenge.

No prizes, but glory and admiration to all who participate. Let's see those shopping bags braided, twisted, knotted! Trash bags tied into terrific shapes. Patterns! Colours! These slings will last for a thousand years!

All constructions eligible. Slings of any size qualify. The only limit is that the sling must be made entirely from plastic bags. Extra (ficticious) points awarded for originality, eco-friendlyness, appearance, style...

I bet between all 480 of us we can come up with some really striking slings!

Matthias

lol good idea Matthias, Ill give that a whirl.

The gauntlet has been cast......


And 'Clint Eastwood'  I ain't.


:-/


However,  I must not sidestep this singularly important challenge.

I will apply myself assiduously to your requested task!


I just hope I don't suffocate myself is all.


:-[



Peace,


TS

8)

Waahoo! You're on.   ;D

Save the earth!  Reuse plastic!

Challenge taken.

Willeke

lol no doubt willeke wil lcome up with somehtign just as good as all her other slings...
Ill also take up the challenge, ive had a go already with a bin bag, was nt very pretty tho...
Rik

Oo ive got an idea that could work well with binbage, not knotting or braiding i dont htink.  I met it sailing, a way of shortening a line by putting oen loop through another and through another and so on...
Wait and see...

lionheart: That sounds a lot like crochet's chain stitch, I think. That's what I made my jute sling out of, it worked real well then.

Alright, I guess I have the first entry then(No doubt due to having WAY too much time on my hands). It's made pretty similar to my last one, plus variations in color. So, here it is!

http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y267/Klarh/MVC-012F.jpg

http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y267/Klarh/MVC-013F.jpg

Lionheart, that knot sounds like the chain knot.  It is really cool.  I first ran into this when I was a kid, watching some building contractors, they used it to tie up a L-O-N-G electrical cord and stow it in their truck.  The really neat part was, when they wanted to stretch out the cord they just grabbed one end and pulled, it came apart like magic! One of the guys tried to show me how it worked, but I didn't get it at the time.  Forgot about it until I saw a picture of Knollslinger's sling, all shortened up, and I HAD to figure out how it was done.  Finally succeeded.

Klarh,  Cool looking sling!  I always like alternating black/white patterns.

Yeah, come to think of it, my Dad used to crochet things, and that's the knot he used.  A large crochet hook would make it real fast and easy to shorten up a sling.  I've been doing it by pushing the loops through with my finger.

Ye thats what i meant, i didnt know what its called.  If you just use loops, it ocmes apart like a quickl release knot, if u just put the string throug hthe funal loops it doesnt come undone.  On boats its use to keep long ropes out of the way

Ok so I tried to drop spindle my strips of plastic bags, but I guess this isnt how its done?? I feel stupid. lol...
Are you guys just reverse-twisting strips of plastic bags to make your cord, or is their a faster way to make the cordage. Im a total novice at this...  ::)

What I did was spiral-cut strips out of the bag(I think mine were somewhere around 2") and then spun them either way. Once I got them spun the first time, I would go back and tie the two loose ends together. Then I would spin it in the opposite direction. I would then repeat until the cord was thick or short enough.

I see, thanks ill try that.  ;D

Hey - coming up with good ways to make the cordage (or not ;)) is a fun part of figuring this one out! This isn't a job I'd pick a drop spindle for, at least without quite a lot of prep. I'm as curious to see what people can come up with for cords as I am to see the finished slings!

Nice first entry Klarth.

I'm glad you guys have picked up the challenge! This should be pretty fun.

Matthias

Matthias has a good point about the drop spindle. It is a good tool, I made yarns for my first few plastic cords using a drop spindle. You could consider this good practice for drop spinning other fibers.

Sooner rather than later you're going to feel the need for speed!

Here's a pig-simple way to get motorized..

1.Take an electric drill and clamp it carefully in a vise or stand.
2. Insert a piece of metal rod in the chuck. This is your spindle.
3. Tie your spinning material to the rod.
4. Spin an armspan of your material into cord.
5. Wind the cord on the spindle.

With practice drafting, spinning, and winding will become a smooth, uninterrupted process.

The trickiest part will be controlling the motor speed. You'll either need a variable speed drill and a friend, or a motor control circuit. I opted for the latter.

This is what you might call the ghetto great wheel.

I guess you made a spindle wheel out of a drill.
(A spindle wheel being the older version of a spinning wheel, just a stick revolving and a way to get it doing that.)

But please remember that there is no emergecy stop in this set-up and unlike the old fashioned wheel, this one keeps on turning if you get in problems.

So if you can get a set-up that stops when you stop pushing a lever or button, that is much safer.

Willeke.

Ive been having a go at this and now i need to ask a few quesitons...
How do you stop the cord untwisting after you've twisted it?
How do you join two bits of untwisted bag together to make one long cord?
Rik

The easiest/best/most common way of locking the twist in a strand is to ply two or more strands together. If you make one longinsh strand and let the middle "kink" back on itself, you'll see that the twist id reversed, and balances out. Then all you need to do is knot the end or apply a whipping and voila!

With most spun yarns, several strands are pre-twisted and stored on spools. Once the final cord is ready to be assembled, those guys are twisted (reverse of original) together to make a balanced ply.

A neat trick that people might like to try is navajo plying. It is a very clever way of making a three strand yarn with a single pre-twisted one. If you are spindle turning, or storing the strand on a bobbin it works really well:

The idea is to attach the loose end to you spindle/wheel/stick, tie a knot and then pull a loop of the free end through like you were tying a "chain knot"/crochet. If you make the loop really big (say 30-40cm) you'll notice that you have three strands. They will want to twist together, so let them. Once the end of the loop starts getting pretty small, pull another loop through! You end up with tiny little "bumps" where the loop ends, but this is usually made up for in the fact that all three strands are more likely to be identical - yielding really professional looking resuts.

The other easy option is not to ply the strands at all. They'll be a little tougher to handle, but any construction that uses more than one strand, like braiding,weaving,knitting, crochet etc (I know the last two are "technically" one strand) will stabilise the twist.

Joining the pieces is little trickier if you are using a single tape of plastic than it might be with more, or with natural fibres. You should be able to just overlap them a bit and let the twist hold them together. The initial yarn will be a little bit weaker at that point since the plastic is so slippery, but it should hold ok later. Alternatively you could melt the ends together? Or knot them. NO rules in this challenge!

Matthias

Willeke is right to bring up safety concerns when using a drill as a spindle wheel. Fortunately shopping bags are made of low density poly. If your drills speeds of out of control you will most likely break your string. If you try this with stronger materials, you could actually get hurt!

This is why you need a friend to help or a way to control your speed/ on-off, preferably hands-free. Trust me, you can make a real mess without this.

Matthias, I Have fused the ends of the ribbons together with great success. With a heat sealer and a drill, I can really crank this stuff out.

And, may be not needed, glue and sticky tape can be used to hold plastic in place while working on it.

Willeke

OK here's another entry...

http://www.scn.org/~bh821/bag_sling.jpg

Klarh is still taking the lead for style. I guess I'll go for the most aggro shopping bag sling sling award. Hey, pretty it ain't but it works pretty dang good for what it is.

Finger loop? Uhh no, try wrist loop. Let's face it, going shopping makes me want to sling hurking Conan rocks! During todays test trials this thing hurled baseball (and larger) sized rocks on average 210-230 feet with relative ease. Yep, that's with the underhand.

A longer sling would get me farther, but I'd rather not be the first member of slinging.org to go to prison for sling induced manslaughter.

Dan,
My spining gear exist entirely of one straigth stick.

But I have seen many drop spindles. They are dead simple to make. Take one stick, from 2 mm up to 10 mm diameter is good. Atach a weight. If there is no stick sticking out above the weight you need to atach a hook, if there is, you may leave it as it is, carve a groove or a hook.
The weight can be many shapes, as long as it evenly divided around the stick. Some people make an x from wood with an hole drilled in its centre and use that. The spindles I learned it with, (home made by my dad,) did have a disk of wood at the very top. Up to the industrial revolution weights have been made from glas, clay and different kinds of metal, all with a hole in the middle to put a it of stick in it. A friend uses whatever she can find, like nuts for bolts, wrapped in tin foil and then covered  with Turks head knots or ball covering knots.

Prefered positions are:
-At the top of the stick,
-One quarter down from the top,
-One quarter to one eight up from the bottom of the stick.

The amount of weight decides how thick you spin. With a very heavy drop spindle it is hard to make very thin yarn, with a very light drop spindle it is imposible to spin a thick wool yarn.

I would experiment with a weight like 100 grams for a starter. (That is going on memory for an averige wool drop spindle.)
You might need 200 grams, or just 50 as easily.

If this is not enough, google. You can do it as well as I and I am too lazy now.

Willeke

It's true, drop spindles are super easy to make. I'm sure you have the parts just kicking around your home. I know I did.

http://www.scn.org/~bh821/drop_spindle.jpg

That's a ball point pen, flywheel from a very old harddrive (love the styish optical encoder), and a screw hook with a bit of hot glue to keep it firm.

So let us recycle computer parts to recycle shopping bags ;D

Willeke

What can I say, I'm a modern primitive...

Not a lot of animal carcasses around here but plenty of dead computers!

Nicely in keeping with the theme! Great example.

I'll admit though that the first thing I thought when I saw the picture was not nice spindle (which it is) but "where on earth did be_slinger find a giant optical encoder disk/flywheel lying around the house?" Urban survival... I once built a shaky leanto entirely out of old hard drives... well, it was a big pile anyways, and it was leaning ;)

Matthias

Lol... hard drive to drop spindle, that seems the only "logical" next step right.  ;)
As a kid my parents were pack rats, and I was forever
taking modern stuff and creating primitive weapons out of them. Tons of fun.

How do you use a drop spindle?
Rik

Make a little bit of string by hand and tie that to the spindle, if there is a disk at the top as in the hard-drive-disk-spindle you tie to the top of the stick just below the disk and go around the disk and wind twice around the hook or tie to the hook with one half hitch, or tie with a half hitch to the bit of stick sticking out above the weight, if the weight is at the bottom of the spindle, tie the start of your string just above the weight and give an other half hitch near the top of the stick.
For beginners I would advice to make a spindle with a hook at the very top.

Now you spin the dropspindle, like you would start a little spinning top. In your one hand you hold the stuf to be spun, with the other hand you alternate spinning the spindle and pulling material to be spun from your hand.
You keep on doing this till your hands are rather high up in the air and your spindle is hitting the ground. Then you stop, untie your halfhitch, roll your new string on the stick as near the weight as posible and tie on again.

With wool you pull some fibers at a time, and before they run out you pull the next few, it happens almost by itself. But if you pull to hard, or the fibers are a little unruly, you may end with just the end of your wool, just pull some new fibers and hold them against the string and they will stick.

With materials like plastic you need to find a way to keep your unspun materials in your hand so they do not knot and when adding a new bit you may need to pinch the old and new bits together till they do hold or you may need to stop the process till you have glued or melted them together or tied a knot.

Willeke

I think your sling looks excellent, be_slinger! I especially love the way that your cordage looks;much better than what you can buy in the stores!

I can never get over the clever knots y'all real slingers make; I could hardly tie a knot if my life depended on it.

I think I'm going to try to make a foot-powered spindle wheel sometime;I could just take the weights off my drop spindle and put the stick into a drill, but I'm probably too clumsy to do anything like that at such high speeds.

Klarh, if you use a variable speed drill you won't have to worry about things spinning out of control much at all. I used an old single speed drill and plugged  it into to a box containing an outlet and an old light dimmer switch with some salvaged power cords and wire nuts for hookups. This is frankly a terrible way to control motor speed but it's field expedient and it worked well enough. No doubt one of our safety minded readers will school me on this one.  

It's worth a few disasters to learn spinning bags with a drill. You will save a LOT of time.

FYI - If you can figure out how to braid a sling out of cordage you made for yourself out of shopping bags, you can learn knots. Seriously, very few people have done what you did. Don't sell yourself short! There's really only a handfull of knots that you absolutely need to know (IMHO). but when you get those down you'll want to know more. You can do some really cool things with a simple rope and a few good knots.

You are indeed the FUN slinger :D

LOL

That was hilarious, Funslinger  :D  We, as a community, could no doubt make that movie and teach the world the evils of Dr. Windknot.

Has anyone else made slings out of plastic bags? Anyone care to give it a try? I might, it looks interesting.

i have, it was made by twisting two 6 inch strips of plastic bag, the tin kind. i didn't use it, but it looked like it would work.

I made one following the idea shown here. I cut the plastic bag into 2" wide strips and looped the strips together into a daisy chain (rather than the method shown in the link)The cords were twisted a lot tighter using a hand drill.  The pouch , made from the left over plastic was made following the tutorials at slinging.org.  Tony
http://www.instructables.com/id/Make-a-sling-weapon-out-of-a-grocery-bag!-Plus-/