I first learned about slingers eons ago from the video game Age of Empires. Two decades later, I came across them again when learning about Dungeons and Dragons or something, and after a few YouTube videos I realized that these were dirt simple to make. So I did. After an hour of launching rocks into the ocean, I've been hooked for the last two months.
My first sling was a mess of paracord that was an utter and complete failure. After doing some more YouTube research, I made this with a couple leather strips and a grommet kit, and it turned out to be a great performer. This is still my main sling, and it packs up very tightly so I can carry it often, or even wrap it on a wrist.
Here's me trying it out for the first time!
My curious school-aged son wanted to give it a whirl, but we quickly realized it was too long for him to use. So I made one for him, keeping the "strips" connected in the middle so he could throw smaller stones a bit easier. Him and I are still learning, but I realized he's at an age where he could probably learn this a lot better than I ever could, so we'll see if I end up raising an ancient Balearic skirmisher or not.
Last Saturday I picked up some polypropylene twine and took a stab at my first woven Balearic-style sling. I used 6 strands of 15' twine, and didn't really do anything fancy—basic 3 strand flat braid down the entire thing. Recognizing that the split pouch was half as thick as the retention/release cords, I decided to tie some paracord in a cobra-knot pattern to reinforce it a bit and add some weight. Admittedly crude (and I haven't tried it out yet) but I get the feeling that I'm gonna end up removing that paracord and just using this until it crumbles. Gotta say though, this was the first time in my slinging journey that it felt like I was holding an honest-to-goodness weapon.
Of course, this morning my son asked me why I didn't make him one, so I applied a lot of lessons-learned from my first attempt and finished this a few hours ago (boy my hands are sore). I'm a lot happier with how this sling turned out. Some changes include adding material before the pouch to make it more robust and improve it's wear-and-tear. It's even tapered kinda, because the added strings were only about a foot long—you can see those strands of twine poking out of the release cord.
Overall, I'm really liking this slinging thing! My little one and I have been visiting the beach often to just fart around and launch stones into the deep. I suspect when he grows up a bit more, we'll try hitting targets. In the meantime, slinging has been a great way to bond with my son, and a good excuse to get out of the house when the weather lets us.
Thanks for reading my wall-of-text!