No idea if these are a good idea or not.
But certainly a fun novelty item

So I figure you've got two approaches:

1) a pouch with a specifically shaped slit in it that will hold a torus shaped type disc (well a torus with a sphere blocking up the centre hole and giving something to sit against the slit. 
The main issue with that, is you will need specific shaped missiles. So a sling and a clay mould. Neither hard - but it's not a general purpose disc sling.

2) a pouch designed to grip the sides of a disc and hold it horizontal during the throw and letting the disc roll out during the release.
It'll need to hold a variety of different sizes and be able to curl into a half circle and flatten out.

As i can't see any commercial value in this (look this kind of thing is how I make part of my living, I have to give the commercial value of anything I design, some serious thought), it's just a fun project for a hot, quiet friday afternoon
Got some good news this morning that a widget I designed and packaged for holding van doors open at set points - is starting to sell reasonable well. So far we've just got it in one retailer as a test, and we're up About £200 - so that's really positive news

I'll go through my current thoughts on disc slings.

1) My first thought was: a flat pouch with the top surface lined with short tapered spikes. My favourite material is flexible polyurethane, so the hedgehog pouch is simple to print and pretty easy to design.
I'm not sure how well it would work, the spikes would need to be far enough apart to allow the disc to get between them, but also close enough together and tall enough so that the disc is firmly held.
Again it's going to limit the thickness of the disc to quite a large degree.
So I'll probably make one 'just because'.

Things to take into account: height of spikes versus length of pouch. As the pouch curls up around the disc, the spikes will face each other. make them too long and the pouch won't close up around the disc, make them too short and they won't hold the disc securely during the windup. 

2) a pouch with each side lined with tapering triangulat 'springs'.
Essentially a v-shaped channel wide at the top and meeting at the base. With the sides, spring loaded. So that as long as the disc is not wider than the pouch, it will slot in and be held nice and secure.

There are two ways to do this with a 3d printer.
1) have the inside of the 'v' empty apart from a few points to attach a small spring to. To literally make it spring loaded. My main issue with this is that I don't have any suitable lightweight compression springs or enough biros of the same type to take apart to get enough matched springs .
 
2) actually print the interior of the 'v' with a spring like sponge.
That's a lot harder to do, but I don't really see any major issues with it, apart from some tricky design work.

Design considerations: You can't have a single v-spring. The pouch still has to curl up. So you will need a set of vertically and horizontally tapered pyramid/obelisk shapes.
FDM 3d printers (what i have) work from the ground up (it's basically a very small and precise hot glue gun that builds an object in very thin layers - in this case around 0.25mm thick layers), as the base of the obelisks facing the pouch interior, will need to be spring loaded. they can't be attached to the base of the pouch itself. ie: at the point, that side of the base starts you would be trying to print on thin air. This does not work.
So I will need to build in a support section that will be cut away when finished. Not a big problem - but something you have to work into the design.

Having thunked on this for a bit. I think I'll go with the 'biro spring' approach.

Just had a look on amazon and I can buy 20 40mm springs for £5.49.
Bugger that. So I'm off to poundland, where I'm pretty sure I can buy more than 20 spring loaded biros for £5 !


Anyone else have any other ideas or a totally different approach to a disc sling - please post your thoughts and ideas.
No-one's getting rich on this - so feel free to share

Also - what sort of discs are we going to sling ?
Is there some cheap object in the world we can use or will we have to make specific ammo.
I mean I can print any size disc from pla - up to a small frisbee. And small discs would be pretty cheap.
A cutter or mould for clay is also pretty striaghtforward.

Or there's coins - a 2 pence coin is a small but potentially great ammo for a tailored hedgehog sling pouch.

When i was a kid we'd buy several rolls of polos (lifesavers to you yanks) and sit at the back of a the cinema on a saturday morning and throw them at all the other kids. They explode when they hit the back of someones head.
That did backfire one morning, my dad happend to be duty sergeant major at the camp where the cinema was and the manaher got fed up at all the complaints and decided to crack a soap bubble with a sledgehammer.
Nobody could prove it was me doing the throwing - but my dad and I both knew lol
So there's that Polos are still really cheap - but probably way too smal and light. A small stick type thrower would work better for polos.

But is there anything around the size of a can lid that would also make great disc sling ammo ?

I need more brains than mine on this  

kinda big though.

I'm thinking something the size of a bean tin top would be easier to carry and should still sling quite well.

And yes - 20 retractable pens from poundland were - that's right £1 !

So got plenty of springs. Plus the body of the pens look like they'd be a really good startpoint for interesting blowgun darts.
Pretty decent two-fer

Just need some sort of use for the inky tubey bits and we could declare a home run

Sprinkles are never optional !

Yeah clay discs are pretty easy to make.

      A large TS7 with extreme cupping would make an ideal disc sling.  I don't have one handy to show you a picture but I sent one to Vetryan in the last SITH.  If he still has it maybe he could post a picture.  In the meantime I'll go through my collection and see if I have one or something similar.

joe_meadmaker wrote on Jul 17^th, 2021 at 11:54pm:

+1 to everything Joe said.

I think a Y-sling with a long pouch to cup the sling would work well, but coming up with some sort of drag mechanism to keep the pouch oriented is also required.  Maybe just a fox-tail off the back of the pouch would work.


We could also try to sling disc golf mini-disks. they are even cheaper, but harder to get to fly correctly. But they would be a great substitute for clay pigeons to get the sling working with those, because they are reusable and won't just break on impact.

That's a really good example Sarosh.  The video shows the erratic flight that can happen.  The rocks are going up in the air, straight, left, right, and everywhere in between.  With a disc made of plastic (or some similar material) that's going to be worse because the projectile is less dense and will be affected much more by air resistance.  A precise throw keeping the disc flat when released will be key.

the Y sling in the video was not made for this particular task.
a better cord adjustment and grip combined with a stiffer flatter pouch will perform better. 

P.S.: also consistent ammo...

joe_meadmaker wrote on Jul 18^th, 2021 at 10:01am:


Except the spin from a right-handed sling throw will be clockwise, so it will look more like a backhand in its flight.