I'm using a sidearm throw, and all my shots are flying like artillery fire, but it seems to be the only way I can throw in a straight line. I've tried several different throwing styles, and I can't decide whether the issue is technical, equipment-related, user error, or a mix of all three. Any advice?
I Remade the cracker, and the release knot a bit stronger. What do you think is missing? I will be Posting a video of my throwing with this next.
Type: split leather pouch
Style: Old fashion style.
After a lot of testing, and seeing people misunderstand slings badly enough to build ones several metres long, I wanted to actually understand the mechanism. I think I'm a bit closer now, after simulating thousands of paths and visualising the data each time. Two things came out clearly.
A sling loads energy most effectively (fairly intuitively) when the cord is lined up with the direction the hand is travelling i.e. the weight trailing directly behind the hand.
That means letting the sling fly straight out sideways is a mistake — it drops you out of the loading phase early and wastes the release mechanism below.
The trick to keep loading without the weight swinging out ahead is a logarithmically collapsing spiral (the amount varies by length of rope/arm, not speed if constant): the cord stays trailing because the path tightens faster than the weight can overtake it. You can see this in a lot of techniques as a final overhead winding motion, which matters more than it looks.
Eventually you can't feed or tighten the spiral any further — by hand that's basically the single meaningful whip right before launch. You throw it out, and the cord releases the energy stored in that trailing position, swinging round to its maximum speed when it's perpendicular (90°) to your hand's motion. Trying to keep driving it during this last bit is much less efficient.
So the sling's real output is a rotation that's perfectly in phase with the hand: the stored spiral energy plus the hand's own velocity, adding together. In phase, my testing says you can get ~70% more speed than a rigid arm of the same reach.
On length, it comes out exactly 1:1 with the arm. During loading, the arm and cord form a right triangle from your hand, and the energy you can store scales with the area of that triangle — which is largest when the two sides are equal. Same reason a square has more area than any rectangle of the same perimeter**.** So making the cord longer doesn't just make the spiral harder to drive — it also hurts the 90° release energy. Longer is not better. There could be also other strange geometric reasons that contribute to why that ratio is more efficient, or the others are a lot worse, but extending the cord is always negative.
A bit messy — the blue dots are just how I guide the curve. The white line is the hand; you can see it stays perfectly trailed at every point as the spiral collapses faster than the weight can overtake it, then flicks back out for peak ball speed at the 90° correction.
Below is the visualized snap.
Hopefully the findings are useful to someone / help mentally clarify some technique. There may be some mistakes but I am fairly confident.
Team, I like a longer strap on my crossbody slings since I like to wear it loosely under my elbow. But many straps force high and tight position. Looking for 2-3 liter sling, ideas?
Inspired by the Primal Slinging minimalistic design, but made out of 2 main strings of paracord, and puch braid with micro cord.
Does well with tennis balls
This has been too much fun! Most misses have been cut out. I think the release point of the sling was about 74 ft away, maybe less. I counted the FPS and plugged it into AI for quick maths to get the speeds.
Note about the MPH: “Speeds are estimated from 60 FPS video over a 74 ft distance. Frame selection introduces an uncertainty of approximately ±1–2 frames, corresponding to roughly ±4–10 mph.”
Are you lifting you back/rear foot after the projectile leaves the pouch?
I've been slinging for a year, but extremely inconsistently, maybe a have 10h of slinging in the past 365 days.
No hits in this video but I managed to get into an aggro flow with my throwing rate as well as keep my throwing direction in target area as well as height
Familiar-Object-4237 asked what would happen if you tried to sling a water balloon.
I made 3 different sizes: big green, medium pink, and small orange. Heres the results:
-Big green- blew up the moment I tried to throw it.
-Medium pink- can be thrown, but deforms so much when you throw it that its pretty much impossible to aim without throwing super slow (and if you throw slow whats the point?)
-Small orange- deforms like pink, but to a lesser degree (duh). Maybe if you were a slinging genius, and adjusted your throw a lot, you might get it going in some direction that could be considered straight.
-BONUS sponge- surprisingly passable. It sprays water like a sprinkler as you swing it, but if you throw before you swing it too much, you can get it to go mostly straight while still having enough water to get someone a little bit wet.
Watched a video on Iron Age slinging and realizing it’s still a hobby today. So naturally I ordered one and some tennis balls. The form looks similar to a baseball throw which I’m very comfortable with but with a delay.
If theres anyone here that fly fishes also I’m wondering if that timing is similar. Visually it looks similar, curious to hear your thoughts.
It's something I've always wanted to do. Seeing vids of building their slings from the ground up using local material that they harvested is a dream of mine. Was hoping I could finally do that but from what I'm seeing it would take a hell of a lot of energy to gather fibers from plants that are available here. Hoping I'm wrong though.
Has anyone tried this? It's winter here so I'm not too tempted to try it for a few months but I've been thinking of this non stop the last hour.
Does it work? Does the sling pop the balloons?
I've just been recently getting into slinging and making some of my own slings, but I've also recently lost a lot of control in my legs. I haven't been wheelchair bound but I'm using a cane now and may be sitting for the rest of my life. I know a lot of the mechanics for slinging are the same as pitching, but any sort of hip rotation or forward steps make me fall flat on my face. All this to say, any advice for slinging while sitting down? Should I make myself a shorter length sling, or are there any throwing styles that work well when sitting?
I want to make a 6 foot sling to try for distance. Im still learning my normal sling but while I get better at that one I want to try a distance sling. I would like it to be a light weight sling to throw smaller rocks. How should I go about making something like this?
