You sir...are a beautiful, beautiful man. Lol!

First of all...5 lbs? Are you insane??? That hurt just watching you sling. And with a 33 inch sling?????    WTF!

I was also surprised that poor target lasted that long.

Also wanted to extrapolate from this video. That was a herculean effort from an admittedly big dude. And you got it moving but imagine slinging that from a raised castle while on top of 40 ft walls. Gravity will get those stones moving so fast it would be instant death on impact. Brutal man. I cannot wait for your next video. You really make some of the best slinging videos out there.

You know what would be cool to see? An arm bone analogue taped to the back of that piece of wood. Then use a long sling and a big stone to see if you can shatter it. Anyways, great stuff!

Nice Joe!  There is some serious energy in those stones!

Thanks all!  Those biggest stones really rocked that target back (no pun intended).  I didn't think to take a picture, but the legs on the back left some pretty huge divots in the yard.  When it was getting knocked into the air, I started to wonder if it might fall over without breaking.


Morphy wrote on May 16^th, 2021 at 10:26pm:

If you know where I can get one, I'll do it.  I ran a search but most of what I see is a replica for the size and shape of an arm bone, but not the strength.

I used to sling 500g rocks and it woukd take a week to recover. Those stones are insane! Awesome video!

NooneOfConsequence wrote on May 17^th, 2021 at 8:22pm:


Ahh yes that would be a nice, inexpensive way to do it.

I think it would definitely depend on how the arm is positioned.  Also I wonder if it would be difficult to make a fairly close shield replica to shoot at? I cant imagine their shields were the equivalent of modern day 1/2 inch plywood in terms of rigidity were they? I mean I guess? Seems really heavy to lug around the entire battle though. Another question while Im at it, is it possible a sheet of plywood as large as that is absorbing some of the energy? What kind of damage would it show if it was a quarter that size? Just curious. It might actually be the opposite.

Then there is the question of what weight is best? Sure 5 lbs is a crazy amount of weight but if you can sling 5lbs as fast as you did wouldnt you be able to sling 8-10 ounces quite fast? Thats still a huge stone. What would be the most destructive weight?

Thanks Albion!  There is quite a bit more to come.


@Morphy - You bring up a lot of good points, and a lot of good questions.  Some of them I hope to get answers for in these tests I'm doing.  I'll try to touch on some of the things you brought up.

Regarding close replica shields for testing, I'm not sure.  There have been so many shields of different shapes and sizes, I think we'd need to start with a specific design, and decide how closely it would need to be replicated.  For some tests a simple circular piece of wood might be sufficient.  For other tests, more might be required.

If we look at any shields in history, I'll always argue that they were great.  These weren't things put together on the spur of the moment.  They were tools that evolved over centuries (obviously shields have been used for millennia, but I don't know how much influence really old ones may have had on less older ones over long periods of time).  And they were built to defend against the weapons of the time they existed in.

You asked about a larger sheet of plywood absorbing energy.  The answer to that is absolutely.  Not only does it have more mass to absorb energy, but being a large sheet, it's also going to be more flexible and therefore less likely to develop a break.  After I got the data from my video, I tried to determine what the impact force was.  Unfortunately that turned out to be way more involved than I expected.  It was ultimately impossible because I would need to get the distance and time of the board's movement to determine the deceleration of the stone, and I don't currently have a way to get that information with any kind of accuracy.

I'm getting quite fascinated with this impact testing.  You asked about smaller stones and what an optimal weight might be.  That's something I'll probably start looking into once all this big stone stuff is done.  But there is an aspect of that question that I already have some information on.  If I was going to set up my test again, and the goal would be to break a hole through the board, I would probably go with a stone in the 600g to 800g range.  Small enough to still get good velocity, and also small enough to break a hole to fit through.  If I wanted to destroy the entire target, then the larger stones are best because of so much weight crashing into it.  It may be noticed in the video that I didn't show any close-up shots of the 2244g stone hit damage.  It's because there wasn't much visible surface damage.  The stone was big and wide, so it wasn't concentrating that power into a small area.  Instead all that weight destroyed the leg supports.