Slingshots!

[Eric Daume]

In one of the last couple of Readers Grant had an article on making sling shots. Mere months later, that has inspired me to get out and make my own. I had saved a few promising Y-branches when I was cutting out some blown down trees from a nearby trail earlier this summer. Surgical tubing from the hardware store, some leather from work (I work in automotive seating, so this is easy to come by), a warmish afternoon in January, and I was on my way.

I don't have Grant's boylike glee at using a pocket knife to cut wood, and I couldn't find mine anyway. I started using a utility knife, but that was slow and daylight was waning, so out came the die grinder. I'm also lousy at knots, so in the spirit of Rivendell I went with zip ties. I'm not sure zip ties are the hot ticket for a long life of high powered rock throwing, but it worked well enough for this trial.

I cut the tubing kind of short, so my little boy could use it. Still, I was able to solidly thunk a fence post on the opposite side of our backyard. My five year old (with me holding the Y and him pulling) was able to send a rock in a gentle arc about 30 feet or so. Not bad! He only hit my thumb the first time.

Good fun on a winter Saturday afternoon. A picture is here:

https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/BH0vfMZCEoM6OGGV5iEsENMTjNZETYmyPJy0liipFm0?feat=directlink

Anyone else have one to show off? I know it might be kind of intimidating to top my masterpiece here, but don't let that stop you.

Eric Daume
Dublin, OH

[PATRICK MOORE]

I made slingshots for my daughter and two friends last summer after my brother trimmed my mother's several, large mulberries. Memories of boyhood, when (age nine to about 12) I was Deadeye Dick with the weapon, hunting lizards in, around and on our houses in, seriatim, Bangalore and Delhi. (I could hit 6" lizards 8/10 up to 30' away, usually high on walls.)

I started with the cheap, split bamboo models sold by the peripatetic toy wallahs for a few cents, then graduated to my own manufactures. Innertube strips in those days produced some force.

But bicycle innertube rubber must be different now, since today's used tubes produce very poor power. Just as well, given my daughter's and friends' gross inability to aim the things with any precision.

Don't get me started about my blowguns or firecracker matchlocks ...

Eric Daume
Dublin, OH

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Patrick Moore
Albuquerque, NM
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[Leslie]

On Saturday, January 7, 2012 6:34:01 PM UTC-5, Patrick Moore wrote:

Don't get me started about my blowguns or firecracker matchlocks ...

Oooo.....   now you're starting to venture towards my childhood:  ladyfingers used w/ a piece of pipe to fire BB's, or sleds tied to the back of a motorcycle as we circled the house in the snow w/ rider in tow...  or using a football to play tag, on motorcycles, in the dark, without headlights... 

[Montclair BobbyB]

Wrist-Rocket, baby!!! THOSE were precision slingshots, and which
technically they were illegal in NJ (back in the 70s, don't know about
now), we had a way of...
"aquiring" them... They were awesome.

[Rob]

Here in Seattle, we've been using a slingshot lately, armed with chick peas, to scare the raccoons away from our chicken coop. One solid connection seems to have gotten the message across. They haven't been back. Seems to work for discouraging feral cats from using the garden as a litter box too, though we haven't hit one yet. The cats are just freaked out by this thing whizzing by close to them. The chick peas are biodegradable of course, and won't seriously harm the animals. 

We made slingshots with surgical tubing when I was a kid too. Used large ball bearings as ammo. I'm amazed we didn't injure ourselves. And then there were the massive ones we used to lob water balloons.... Fun stuff.

Rob in Seattle

[PATRICK MOORE]

I love home made weapons -- they are crude enough not to pose any real danger unless the user is insane or a monster.

In high school I made a few slings (the David versus Goliath type) that would hurl an unripe avocado over 200 yards (I think the world record, but with something denser than avocados, is 400 meters). Never could aim them well, though. (Our three acres included several avocado trees that bore abundantly of fruit that sat on the ground and rotted.)

A bit younger, at 12 or 13, I made effective blowguns out of 1/2" pipe, 3 feet long. Darts were made by placing a needle at the far end of a toothpick and diligently winding thread around the junction until it met the pipes interior diameter; nail polish kept it all nice. These were good for 30 yards or more -- but the only thing I hit was a holy cow (they ran loose in New Delhi) and that purely by luck. I was as surprised as the cow, which did a jump and ambled off.

Also in HS I made firecracker matchlocks (my father told me about using plumbing pipe and cherry bombs to fire golf balls; this would have been in the 1930s). I made my own bullets out of solder melted over a fire and poured into a home-carved mold. Loading involved carefully installing the cracker, little finger-sized for the arquebus, at the bottom of the sealed tube so that the fuse stuck out of the hold cut near the breach; then wrapping the ball in a small piece of greased cloth and ramming it down. A smoldering cord clamped in a pivot sprung for activation by a below-stock lever lit the fuse which would then slowly ignite and, eventually, fire the cracker and eject the bullet. I tried shooting birds with it, but by the time the thing fired the birds had casually looked around, yawned, and flown away. 

I don't know how powerful the arquebus was, but a much smaller derringer using a smaller cracker in a 3" barrel with roughly 75 mm bore punched a hole through the bottom of a large, sturdy tin can (Kimbo, Kenya's answer to Crisco, used to come in gallon cans) from 5 feet; the can was perched unsecured on a hedge and the force was such that the ball punched a clean hole through the tough bottom of the can without budging the can's position.

And then there was paraffin/kerosene incineration of hundreds-of-meters-long, massed trails of army ants -- but that I don't have to apologize for, as these were very dangerous to confined, young and disabled life.

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