I don’t know J.  The sling works on tension.  The stiffness may have a small effect on lag angle and release timing but so does pouch shape, ammo, and style. I don’t think it can be boiled down to cord stiffness... unless “good” is defined as a sling you just like. If stiffness elicits a positive visceral reaction for you and that’s your definition of good, then I can’t say you are wrong, but other people may have a different opinion.

I agree that a tight braid is preferable to a loose one.  A loose braid can have a lot of movement between the cords.  I've definitely had this happen with some of my braids and the sling ends up feeling like it has a lot of stretch.

I'm curious about paracord with the core removed.  I'm cutting out a pouch right now.  Hopefully give it a test in the morning.

bNooneOfConsequence wrote on Jan 19^th, 2021 at 8:41pm:


It's about how quick the pouch turns to the turning of your wrist. If it is instantly or nearly instantly, it is very good. This means you have control over the angle of release, and allows consistency in the release, and consistency in spiralling. If that's not what makes a ''good sling'' than I would say you are sling relativist, I guess. 

The single cord-outer mantle sling has a huge lag in the pouch when I turn my wrist, even with light ammo, and short cords. It just wants to twist around itself, even with the widest grip. I don't use real paracord for this experiment, so your results may differ. but the principle is the same, the outer mantle alone has lost its tightness without the core. But maybe real paracord outer mantle is still stiff enough to provide enough control, but I doubt it.
This means consistent releases are impossible, the sling becomes very unpredictable, will it give a top spin, spiral spin, side spin, etc, you no longer have control. it's useless. Again, if you are a beginner slinger that hasn't learned pouch angle control yet, or only sling perfect ice spheres, this may be less noticeable or important. But if you sling point first biconicals most of the time, you notice it immediately if you cant control the pouch angle.

The way to regain control over the pouch angle is by stiffening the sling up. Possible through various methods. In case with a single cord paracord sling, using cord with a core helps. Traditionally the way has been to braid the tightest as we can. This helps. Other ways include very tight whipping on parts of the sling. A sling that is both light yet tight is the best.

David Morningstar wrote on Jan 20^th, 2021 at 6:52am:


+1. Testing is key.

Here’s another test J:
Try stiff and floppy cords on a staff sling where twist should be nonexistent and let’s see if there are other differences between the two.

Interesting. I’ve seen these before but I wasn’t looking at technical details of the motion.

I have a old phone cord that's braided kern mantle over wires. It's cord like but quite stiff and there is  virtually no twist in it compared to normal cordage. I'll be using it to make my trash sling two days from now as well as concrete ammo for consistent throwing and test it out against a control sling with gutted paracord and non-gutted paracord.

I'm super rusty but it won't matter since all slings will be used by me. I'll get back to you with hard results as soon as I can.