It has been a few months now since I made my first sling. It was of the leather pouch flavor. Since the leather for the pouch was too thick, it naturally sucked ass. My second sling followed the instructions for the braided split pouch. This worked great so I've been a split pouch guy ever since.

Well this week I had a brain fart and came up with a super easy way to make a leather pouch sling. By easy I mean no puching holes, and no buying grommets. All you knot freaks probably know where I'm going with this.

When cutting out the pouch, I tapered the ends into thongs. Then I just tied the cords to the pouch thongs using a sheet bend. Here's a link for how to tie a sheet bend.
http://www.iland.net/~jbritton/sheetbend.htm

I gave the sling a short test drive today and had a blast. Tried slinging a rubber ball at a concrete wall in the warehouse. What a satisfying *SMACK* it made! The automatic projectile return was nice too.

I'll post some pictures soon.

Looks like fun, easie to make and quick on top of that.
Just test and check the knots, if your string is sliippery, you may need to re-tie after a while.

My second sling did take as little time, I have looked back for a photo of it. You can see how I cut the plastic. (It is tyvek, a kind of plastic that behaves like leather.) It is rather big, but I made it forrather big balls too. I still have it but have not used it for a while because I changed my ammo to small, golfball sized rubber bals.

Willeke

hello, i'm new here (or maybe new here again, might have posted here a year or two ago, can't remember), i've got a couple pictures to share with you and separately a cautionary tale to share, if this test post goes through.

hello, long time periodic reader, possibly first time poster, can't remember.
these pictures illustrate a way i've found to very simply and quickly
make a sling from any strong cord, starting with sheepshank knot,
slipping long ends through the loops trapped by the half
hitch...resulting in sheetbends at each end of the pouch.
then you inch cord back and forth till it is tight and balanced as you
like, currently i like to have the central cord of the pouch just a
little bit longer to give the pouch a little bit of concavity.
to finish you'd take a second thinner cord of any type and weave it
amoung the three cords, or you could make a more solid basket pouch by
adding two more little cords as ribs in the spaces between, giving you
a woven pocket of five ribs.
with about 5 feet of 4 to 7mm static line and a shoelace i can make a
sling i'm happy with in about 15 minutes.
i like this design as it's easy to make, strong and seems to hold
stones very securely, but this is a newly discovered design for me,  i
don't really know it's strong and weak points yet, just wanted to
share it with you fellow enthusiasts.    

here are the pictures of the sheetbend/bowline based sling i've constructed:

you can see my friend's nose, an accomplished string theorist, in this picture.


now taking them apart, you're seeing either a bowline or a sheetbend knot depending on how you want to think about it.


the two long working ends come back out of the two loops to show that it started as a sheepshank, which is just a Z semi-secured at each end by a half hitch.

...or as i like to say it,' loops and cursive Es'.


as to the cautionary tale, many years ago when i was 12 or so a friend
of mine and i were slinging, i'd made both of our slings and we were
happily smashing rocks against a cliff face several hundred feet away.
the two of us stood about 50 feet abreast from each other and fired on
the cliff ahead of us.
we were using a helicopter style (really a home baked figure 8 based on cracking a whip) and had leather pocket pouches.
to make a long story short one of my stones slipped from it's pocket
as it passed directly behind me, my friend bent down to pick up a
stone just as my misfire went hurdling twards his side... my stone
collided with his head, he stood upright, screamed and fell over on
his back and did not move.
by the time i could blink and run over to him he had gone white and
had swelling at his right frontal lobe the size of a cue ball.
he came too but was incoherent and screamed for several minutes... we
iced his head and gave him asprin, thankfully he survived and had an
appetite for fast food 2 hours later.
his rightfully irate parents x-rayed him and found that his skull had
been slightly cracked.
we remained friends, even slung together a bit but were always more
fearful as we did not understand any safer methods of construction or
release.
i have always been horrified at how close i came to killing my friend
and grateful that it did not come to pass that way.
i didn't have but about half my energy at that point of the windup,
the soft sandstone nodes we were using could be crushed between our
fingers, and i missed his temple, hitting the stronger, rounded dome
of his forhead instead... but why he had to bend down right then i'll
never know.
a true story guys.
"a wise man learns from his mistakes, but wiser still to learn from
the mistakes of others."

Neolyth, may be you can PM better if you register.

Welcome.
Thank you for sharing the photos. They show what I tried to explain a short while ago, making a simple sling with a woven pouch.

That story about you and your friend is awsome, a good warning to have. Especially since you were both aiming at a save rockface and should have been out of the firing line in any case.

Willeke

Thanks neolyth!

The simplicity of design and wide range of possible materials are exactly what excited me about this sling. The pouch doesn't even have to be leather. It could be a scrap of cloth, or even plastic.

SV, as long as the knot is properly set slippage shouldn't be a problem. If it is try the double sheet bend. The leather I used is fairly thin and supple. I'm pretty sure the pouch will rip before the knot slips. For the record, I always set the knot carefully and give the whole sling a good hard pull before using for the first time. This sling is stonger than it looks.

I too am a fan of the sheepshank sling. Your idea of weaving it into a solid pouch takes it to the next level and frankly totally rocks! Here's a photo I posted a while ago with one of mine.


http://www.slinging.org/forum2/yabb/YaBB.cgi?board=1;action=display;num=11200196...

It's made of hand-spun coconut fiber. It is primitive as all hell, but that was kind of the idea. I have another one tied in paracord that ranges really far. It has produced more aww cr@p moments than I care to count. I learned what I like to call the slingshank from a book called Whittlin', Whistles, and Thingamajigs by Harlan Metcalf.

Cautionary tale indeed. It's easy to underestimate the power of the sling.

nice rock

neolyth, I've made a sling after the manner of your sheepshank+weaving technique, and I really like it.  What a slick and handsome design.