I've got a large (15ft high) dead (lack of water) , blue flowering (it was when it was alive), Californian Lilac. This is a really super hard, hardwood species, that produces many forked branches which are perfect to make a natural slingshot from, preferably when dead as these are specimen plants.
I used an el cheapo bush saw to cut off a suitable fork. Lilac is a great hardwood if you can find it. Big trees make a great show piece for anyone's garden so the chances that a dead one comes along is rare. They produce many even sized forks and this stuff is really strong not to mention looks great when sanded down.
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| Notice the crack, no problems as this wood is so hard it will not propagate any further; I'm going to fill this crack anyway with epoxy resin. I used my trusty RaidOps titanium frame lock to carve off most of the bark-but not all, this was important, as I wanted to use that bark as a "guide" layer when grinding the grip. |
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| Now with most of the bark gone, I wanted to get rid of those knots but not all of them because I'm going to put them to use in the grip design. Seen here again using my trusty RaidOps titanium frame lock folder, which is absolutely perfect for carving wood with. |
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| Titanium and aluminium alloy sling shots look just fantastic ( i want one too BTW) but the home made organic look and feel of nature's own composite material; WOOD, has a bit of an enduring thing to it! it's also light weight but strong (if you pick the right wood to work with). Plus I made a simple forked branch one when i was a kid and we could easily dispatch small game and punch holes in water filled cordial bottles when we loaded up those rubbers with small rocks (bearing were too hard to come by when i was a kid-unless u took them from ball races yourself). |
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| Using both the knife's serrated edge and a bush saw I roughly removed most of the protrusions |
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| Bush saw to quickly remove most of the small side branches. |
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| Using a HB pencil, I marked out the boundaries of where i would remove excess material from. |
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| Starting to take shape |
From this fork to......
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| From this...... |
To this!
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| Given a good coating of bee's wax, fitted a leather pouch and carry krab, almost ready to test fire! |
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| Fitted with low power "exercise bands" |
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| Fine tuning the custom grip |
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| Set up for OTT bands, these ones were totally under powered...... stick around for some gutsy ones! |
Video coming soon on BCT!
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