A spare power band is a small, cheap, lightweight survival item that could be easily fashioned into a working slingshot and tip the balance in ones favor in a survival situation.

I have had slingshots since I was a kid, and I carry one one in my backpack today, and many a puffball and dangling walnut have fallen prey. With all that practice, I can't come close to this level of skill.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ieWrWLjii0

Good skill to have, and abundant cheap ammo, but it's not as easy as it looks, especially for catching game. Practice. Practice. Practice.

This gentleman is freakishly accurate with a slingshot! And doing it with a point-shooting style to boot.

With skill like that, birds and other small game are certainly a reasonable source of food. Compact, quiet, virtually unlimited ammo. I'd put this guy against Goliath any day!

Colour me skeptical. I like slingshots, but small game takes a lot more killing than you might think. They are tough and resilient little buggers. IMO, if you want to eat, you pack a single-shot .22 and/or a bunch of mouse and rat traps.

Here is an interesting idea where a knife or axe with a lanyard hole can be used as a handle for a small slingshot.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aRXxp9HAPM&feature=watch_response

Well-said. Here is a guy who does just that.

The last half the video documents actual game kills, so avoid if you don't want to see that.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXASb6V0O8U&NR=1&feature=endscreen

I agree with the comment that it's not as easy to be accurate as these YouTube videos make out. I've been using a standard commercial slingshot against a dartboard (target) from about 7 yards. The shots are going wider than I would like ... they're all on the dartboard, but by no means on the bullseye. I'm thinking right now that to improve accuracy I should shorten the distance between the prongs on the slingshot, and maybe lengthen the bands a bit. This should reduce the angle of error for each shot. We'll see.

I didn't check the YouTube, but if it's that slingshot guy in Carolina - that man is simply amazing. :-)

Doug's comment about difficulty in killing small game might be right for critters like rabbits. A slingshot would work well for small birds, and probably squirrells as well.

Pete2

I have harvested rabbits and squirrels with my hunting slingshot (I have small backpack model, a mid-sized folder, and a big extended-fork hunting model), but to everyones point, I have missed some too.

The trick of aiming is to select a draw point with your right hand (if you're right-handed) and always keep it there. That might be near the right jaw or cheekbone. You aim with the slingshot hand, using the center of an imaginary line between or slightly below the top of the forks...practice will dictate. The bands must be of equal length and power (sometimes one band will develop thin areas near the fork, especially when used in cold weather). Keeping the slingshot facing square to the target, using spherical ammo, and keeping the ball centered in the pouch are important.

And like Bacpakjac says; practice, practice, practice....

I wanted to see if I could stun a fish in a shallow creek with a heavy 12 mm steel ball. I went out into the woods this weekend and found a stream with 9" creek chubs, but I blustered up to the creek and they were extremely skittish and fast and I didn't get off a shot.

http://www.catsdomain.com/


slingshot with red dot site.

available option for shooting multiple shot- up to 50.....

still 1/2 price of a reasonable airgun.

illegal in CA and NYC....

Actually, they are legal here in California. A lot of shippers are no longer sending stuff here because of the internet sales tax law (AB 28). It requires medium/large out of state internet retailers to collect sales tax on items sent to CA.

As far as proficieny with a regular cat goes. I can land about 85% of my shots on a paper plate at 10 yards using paintballs. The distance goes up when I switch to steel or other amunition with a better ballistic coefficient. For those wanting to make an arrow slinger, the Trumark RR2 (heave black bands) pull in the low twenties for your average adult male. Your average "kids" arrow (25 lbs spine / 28" length) will shoot fine out of these. My only caveat is it takes a fair amount of strength to hold onto the pouch without a "bulge" to slip your fingers around.

You guys are actually sighting through the center of the slingshot frame ... a lot like archers do with a bow and arrow? I'm guessing then that you use a good pair of impact goggles on your face while shooting. Otherwise there is risk to your eyes if one of the bands breaks.

The Carolina slingshot guy doesn't even sight this way ... he is somehow able to judge his shots - while not looking thru the slingshot itself. I guess this is just due to a tremendous amount of experience :-)

Pete2

Shooting accurately does take some practice, but it is not as difficult as some here are saying. Step number one: It you are not shooting accurately, it is your technique 99% of the time. This is one sport where high end equipment does not make you better.

Come over to http://slingshotforum.com and visit and learn from many excellent shooters there.

Thanks. Sounds like i will have to make the visit. :-)

Pete2

[/quote]

My only caveat is it takes a fair amount of strength to hold onto the pouch without a "bulge" to slip your fingers around. [/quote]

Very true, but it iooks like these guys found a solution to that problem. They rigged up a loop to hook a standard release onto.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2cHMYRJzzI

Pardon my doubting ways. There is no better evidence than meat in the pot.

I assume you are using steel shot and not pebbles out of the local streambed?

While slingshots are a relatively modern invention, slings are not. They've been used as weapons, quite effectively, all over the world for thousands of years. Even King Tut had slings buried with him in his tomb.

Now I won't argue that slingshots aren't great, as they are. However, they're not something that can be easily made with items typically found in nature. That means, you have to plan to have one on you when you need it and hope it doesn't fail on you. Personally, if I'm going to the trouble of carrying a weapon with me, I'm going to carry something that packs a bit more punch anyway (like a rifle, handgun, modern bow, ect).

Now a true sling (shepherd's sling) is something that could definitely be made with items found in nature and aren't horribly complicated. Besides the sling, you've got other primitive weapons like the throwing stick, atlatl/dart, or simple bow/arrow.

With that in mind, if you've never used a sling (or atlatl), try making one and giving it a whirl (though, do be careful). It's a fun way to learn a great lost skill that heavily contributed to the survival of our ancestors. As an added benefit, you never know when it might come in handy for your survival.

I do carry about 12 - 6mm steel balls with me, weighing in at about 1 1/2 ounce. One of the gifts of the glaciers here in MN is the deep and common deposits of smooth gravel. Appropriately sized round-ish pebbles can be surprisingly accurate due to the 'golf ball effect'.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating that anyone depend on a slingshot as their primary survival tool. I am a big fan of the .22 and if I'm not carrying a shotgun, that's what I usually have with me. That said, there are places and times, such as big state parks and public hiking trails, where any firearm would be problematic, so I have my slingshot.

The little one weighs only 4 oz, and the balls weigh 1 oz for 8. If a person is gram-conscious, they could just carry a replacement power band and a couple of rubber bands to make a slingshot from a tree branch with the knife and saw on their Wave.

Some past postings here recount an incident where coyotes got bold along a public hiking trail, and killed a female hiker. If she had been able to deploy a slingshot with a marble-sized pebble at 10 yards, that coyote would have run howling into the woods.

All this rationalization aside, my wife has diagnosed that I never really grew up all the way. My latest quarry was ice formations along a partially frozen creek in the backwoods last weekend.

I love my slingshot. I don't practice often but I do use manufactured slingshot pellets when I do. I also carry it occassionally/fairly often when I hike.

After reading the responses, I now think I should have named the post " Slingshot....a low-tech survival skill? They really aren't primitive at all.

Apparently the ethnic Kachin rebels in Myanmar carry slingshots in addition to their AKs:



From: www.hydroworld.com/index/display/news_display.1586689741.html

I think they copied that from their cousins,The Karen people of Burma

Within this veil
Of toil and sin
Don't know who's belt
The slinghot's in


Burma Shave