Surely one of us can find someone with a radar gun or some sort of measuring devise to see the speed of a projectile coming out of a sling. Unfortunately, baseball season is over. We have a minor league team here in Greenville and they have a booth at the stadium that you can pay a few bucks and throw some baseballs at a target that will gauge the speed. Maybe next year I will talk to the guy.

Does anyone know if a police radar gun could measure the speed of a slingstone? We have a State Trooper who brings his kids to our daycare. I am going to ask him about it. It would be nice to know what speed I was thowing at.

O. K., friends, try to follow me here:

Suspend a 100 lb weight of some sort.  It should hang from a fairly long rope.  Set up a table or platform behind it, back several feet.  Get a long round stick and make a holder on the table for it.

Put the stick on the table and hang it out so it touches the suspended weight.  Mark the stick with a line at the point where it enters the holder.  Or mark it with 1/10 ft marks and note which one is at the edge of the holder.

Weigh a stone as accurately as possible.  I would suggest using grams or grains and converting to ounces.

Sling the stone and hit the 100 lb weight.  Measure how far the stick moved into its holder.  Every foot of movement is 100 ft/lbs of energy.  Calculate backwards to find the speed.  You know the ft/lbs and the projectile weight, so this should be easy.

This might be a bit confusing, but it should work.  The only trouble is getting a target that won't absorb too much energy or cause the stone to bounce.  Wet sand might be the trick.

jeff <><

David,

You could also try with your digital camera in a manual mode or with preselection time of the shutter mode. Try to hit the moment just after the release. I know, it's not easy, is a bit like a lottery, but expriments with the DC cost nothnig. Maybe you will succeed to snap the trail of projectile. For example if you will set the shutter at 1/60 s and the trail will be 20" long, then the projectile velocity will be

v = 20 / (1/60) =20 * 60 = 1200"/s = 100 ft/s

It would be good to use a uniform and contrasting background, some wall or the sky, for example. Using of a tripod and a remote control (photographer's security) makes sense too. For the more precise trail measure you may put some scale close the release point.

I think this way of measure should be pretty precise.

Jurek

Nemesis,

I am near Greeneville, SC--the north-western part of the state.

I have used the sports device called SpeedChek. Not expensive. I believe it uses an IR or ultrasound method. You throw the projectile over the top of it so it measures release velocity. I hit the device once and busted it up, but it still works. Next time I'll try protecting it with something.

Chris,  I don't recall what my tosses measured, its been awhile. Also, I'm not a powerful slinger. Thom Richardson did some tests using a UK military weapons range. Unfortunately, those books are packed away right now. It was published in the Royal Armourie Yearbook.

added:  Found it!  Thom said that the average sling velocity was 31 m/s (69 mph). 

He also said that the almond-shaped lead traveled further than lead balls and outranged stones by about 50%.

Dan_Bollinger wrote on Feb 2^nd, 2004 at 8:36pm:


The easiest way of accurately measuring sling speed without any special equipment is by looking at the recorded sound wave with a program like "Audacity". Your laptop will probably have the sound recording facility inbuilt.

Sling at a target a few metres away. The "swish" sound of the release and the whack of the projectile hitting the target are very readily both heard and seen on the graph so the time interval is accurately known from the scale. Measure your slinging distance with a tape measure and work out the speed with your trusty calculator. Easy!!

BTW 31 m/s (or 69mph) is very slow; even my 14yo daughter easily exceeds that. Any of the experienced slingers on the forum will be doubling that or more. Baseball pitchers and cricket bowlers get 100+ mph speeds without the aid of a sling.

u can use a digital camera to record your throw, time the stone from realese to hit, and find the distance of the throw.  the formula would be distance/time=feet/yards/meters per second