This Christmas I bought 2 Pan slings for brothers-in-law, convinced another brother-in-law to purchase one for another brother-in-law, and I myself received one from yet another brother-in-law. 4 Pan slings in total were exchanged this Christmas. I’ve been slinging tennis balls across families’ back yards with brothers and brothers-in-law for 3 days straight. Anyone else?
That’s awesome. I got to sling with my dad for a while a few months ago. Good times
My dad joined us for a short period of time. He stopped pretty quickly saying that his shoulder hurt.
Got one for my son and one for me. I also just finally got an order in for one from Primalslinging. That’s going to take a while since they ship from the Dominican Republic.
Oh, man. Is shipping crazy expensive? I was looking at his slings too.
It’s not too bad. I think like $15-20 to the US. It’s just that it may take like 4 Weeks.
≈25% of the product cost hurts a little. But it looks like he makes a fantastic product. The shipping isn’t his fault. Let me know how it performs.
I’ll try to remember to come back here and let you know! It certainly looks like a great product.
I have wanted a Pan Sling for over a year now. I wish I could justify the cost, because they certainly look like fun! Congrats!
Yeah, I would’ve had trouble justifying the cost for myself too. I felt ok buying them for others as Christmas presents though. I just got lucky and received one as a gift as well. If that hadn’t happened I’d be going DEEP down the self made sling rabbit hole.
You'll probably head down that way anyways if you get into it!
Just got done braiding a 30" 5-strand Jute sling with some Jute bought from Harbor Freight, cost me around $1 but two hours of time while watching training videos at work.
There's Mersa seatbelt slings, they cost around the same, but can be done in 20-25 minutes and perform better than a lot of my braided ones.
I did braid a Balearic sling from 550 paracord but it was too thick and stiff, I think. I also made a few single strand slings with woven paracord pouches but they could’ve hold tennis balls well. I plan on making my 2 small sons a pair of Balearic slings for tennis balls once I get a thinner more flexible paracord.
I am wondering though, and maybe you can help me, where do I learn all of the rope work and knot work skills for all of these slings? Like, all the braids, weaves, knots, splices, etc.
Jute. Jute is the answer to many things.
It is incredibly cheap and you can get good practice with it. I got 1000FT of it from Mr. Bezos for less than $5. You can't touch that with paracord. It has no real stretch, it is light weight...
It just tangles a bit because it has good grip. Which translates into a very secure pouch.
I used this video to learn how to do a 3-strand braid
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-LQoy2DqCU
For Jute, since it's usually 2mm in diameter, I doubled it to a 6 strand braid, but just treated it as 3 sets of 2 and did the normal 3 strand technique.
I recently did a 5-strand braid out of Jute. I like it quite a lot. I looked up how to do a 5-strand braid and used what I learned from the 3 and 6 strand braid.
May look into doing a 4 strand braid next just to see how it looks.
Knots are easy enough fore most. Plain old overhand knot works for me at the end. Got fancy with paracord with a matthew lock-knot but for jute, good old overhand.
Paracord was too expensive for me to practice on, with 100 feet being around $6. And then I'd have to take the guts out to make it not too heavy. And then it'd be stretchy.
Jute just makes it all better.
Ya know, everything you’re saying seems to be a relatively consistently held position. I think I’m gonna do it and get some jute.
Why did you do 6 strands instead of 3? Just wanted some more substance?
You got it. Jute twine that you find is usually 2mm in diameter, whereas 550 Paracord is 4mm.
To get a similar bulk, I just double the strands, but it's also the reason I'm trying a 5-strand and then in the future a 4 strand.
I didn't have any actual problems throwing with 3 strand jute, though. It was even lighter than a single Paracord seatbelt sling too at 11 grams versus the seatbelt sling's 14 grams.
It's just when you go to taper it, there's just not much at the end!
Slinging.org ;)
I just got accepted today.