Whipartist
Senior Member Past Moderator
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Stone Slinger/Stick Thrower
Posts: 381
Sand Creek, CA
Gender:
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Hello All,
Sadly I haven't gotten much practice lately. Last night I was trying to figure out how to change that.
I figure consistent daily practice is the key to getting good with a sling..., even if only 3 minutes a day. And that is hard to achieve for a lot of us with limited space. I'd like to throw around some ideas if anyone's interested and in the same situation as I am. Unfortunately some of us just don't have the place to even make these ideas work.
A few years back I made a sling that could handle tennis balls. I went to tennis courts to practice slinging against the little signs hung on the caged sides of the court. I got pretty good with tennis balls. I also bought some good rocks from the local concrete company. They let me pick and choose the ones I wanted. I'd go out in a field and aim at trees from 50 yards. But I had no place to practice close range accuracy with rocks. And the rocks got lost in the weeds never to be found again.
I got myself a big plastic tarp and strung it up in my backyard and slung my tennis balls at it. My accuracy got pretty good with tennis balls but not a lot better with rocks. The rocks would fly right through the tarp. The tennis balls were too light to feel the same as rocks. So more recently I've bought a horde of t-balls. They are better still, but I believe the drag on the balls as I sling them makes them still not quite comparable to rocks. Rocks can accelerate very fast in a sling cradle and it makes them a lot different from balls. To get really good with rocks you need to sling rocks. Having said that, t-balls and tennis balls are better than nothing.
So anyway, I've decided I'm going to look for some sort of heavy cloth tarp or heavy netting to sling rocks into. The cheap plastic tarps are worthless against rocks so I'll look around. If anyone has any ideas on where to get such a tarp, let me know. I also plan to paint a bunch of rocks neon orange so I won't loose them in the grass, for practice in my backyard range.
That's my idea. Does anyone else have any news or ideas on how to improve our ability to practice in our modern world? I've heard of secluded places in parks and concrete dumps and of course some of us own big places where we can sling on the privacy of our own land. Any other creative ideas?
I've been considering where to buy or how to make a heavy but small and soft ball. Something with say a lead core but a soft rubber exterior. Such a ball would be very valuable to us slingers because we wouldn't need special slings to be able to accomodate it, it would be comparable to rocks in weight and balistics, and would not cause danger or damage to objects it struck. Got to go.
Ben
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