Hunting: Slingshot Aiming Techniques (Intuitive)

Description

Become a Patron:

https://www.patreon.com/MCQBushcraft

Bushcraft Basics Blog - http://www.mcqbushcraft.co.uk/bushcraft-basics/

Amazon Store:

UK Store - http://astore.amazon.co.uk/mcqbushcraft-21

US Store - http://astore.amazon.com/mcq-20

Merchandise:

T-Shirts - http://mcqbushcraft.spreadshirt.co.uk/

Connect On My Website - http://www.MCQBushcraft.co.uk

Connect On Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/MCQBushcraft

Connect On Instagram - http://www.instagram.com/mcqbushcraft1

Connect On Twitter - http://www.twitter.com/MCQBushcraft

Tags: woodland,forest,mountains,river,lake,tinder,Survival,Bushcraft,survivor,knife,knives,valley,axe,camping,tent,footwear,hunting,fishing,backpack,clothing,boots,primitive,nature,shelter,shooting,shotgun,rifle,rucksack,flashlight,torch,craft,plants,trees,education,wilderness,family,hobbies,fun,animals,game

Video Transcription

hi guys we're out here today doing some target practice with the slingshot and thought I'd do a video really just to answer a couple of questions and obviously a lot of lot of questions that get on YouTube about my slingshot hunting just on the slingshots I use sort of the technical aspect of them I suppose

and also different slingshots in terms of grips and how to aim and ammunition bands you know I won't go into too much detail about them because obviously my experience is very limited but yeah I'll show you my take on it and yeah my answer a couple of questions really so I've got three sling shots there in front of me one your ler you'll see the most on my videos I'll just introduce them briefly but it will go into more detail a little while about them in terms of their design but this is the chief AJ hfx sling shot this is probably the one I use primarily when I'm hunting and I'm the most accurate with this is another one here that I got recently this is made by a slingshot designer he has a shop on eBay I believe he has his own website as well magpie his name is marcin herd and this is the h h to really beautifully finished slingshot it's got a troll finish very robust you can see there you've got holes drilled through the top of the fork so you can use you can use tubes or flats basically you just put some ball bearings inside the tube it obviously stops the sorts of the bands coming out but it's a really nice design i've wanted something more traditional and more lightweight for backpacking there's also that one's a little bulky and it does have some weight to it so yeah really really liked this one I'm getting a lot better in terms of accuracy as well this one here is made by friends of mine on YouTube his name's Luis and this is actually a really good slingshot very compact and great for just wrapping up putting in your pocket and going for a walk but this is called the little fork er and Louis's channels could wandering Gibbon he does a lot of slingshot shooting and lots of hunting he's definitely worth checking his channel ax really yeah he's quite a seasoned outdoorsman and he's got quite a lot of knowledgeable information on this channel yeah this is tanked it up with some pretty heavy bands actually although it can be designed mainly to use with flats I've drilled some holes in and adopted the same sort of fashion the Haight HT but unlike the HH to you you actually wrap that round like so and fire it that way so you wouldn't want to use it like that whereas the band's would probably just crash into the frame and the slingshot so you'd wrap it around and then do a little flick at the end but this is a pretty powerful slingshot and you know I find it very accurate actually so this is the first slingshot I'll show you this is the hf x slingshot this is the one i use primarily and yeah it's usually marketed as like a a survival sort of a gang style slingshot where you can launch arrows and rocks and i think it's like a fishing reel attachment you can you can sort of take fish with them and then and then reel the fish in so it's kind of like one of these extreme slingshots but i like the design of it i like the frame are used to when i first bought it interestingly enough i used to hold it like this finger and thumb support I didn't have this wrist brace I just had it like that much like the other counterpart sling shot quick point and like that obviously is it's quite an efficient way of using a sling shot but what I find with this frame here was aluminium I've got the original one it's this it's the is exactly the same frame as the true mark s9 it's obviously the slingshots that are marketed from chief aja a sort of in collaboration with true mark iceberg I suppose so a lot of the designs and a lot of the materials come from true mark so this aluminium frame is about 6.5 mil when you use heavy bands with it it's just started snowing quite a bit when you use heavy bands with it what you'll find is by placing your thumb here and then drawing back the band this this this frame here will gradually Bend and what was happening with mine I didn't notice until I sort of got home and I looked it and I felt way like what happened there did I drop it but actually it was the it was where it had my thumb here and weezing such a heavy band say with she's that I was using thera-band black at the time it was just gradually bending forward and eventually I had fracture marks at this join here and I decided that it just wasn't up to the job so I bought a replacement frame which was this one and I just bought a true mark s9 it was exactly the same frame I was thinking maybe I had an early model maybe maybe they actually a steel but I just had like a very early model where it was aluminium but now they're all aluminium they're all aluminium the quick point the H affects all the true mark ones it's an aluminium frame so if you're going to use heavy band so I'd suggest you you scrap the aluminium frame I mean my answer to it was I bought the wrist brace I thought okay well if I buy the wrist brace then I'm not putting my thumb here and hopefully and you know it won't Bend anymore maybe maybe that's that's why it's bending you know because the heavy bands meant to go along with a wrist brace but even with the wrist brace as the band's would fly forward from the force of the band's returning and contracting the frame was bending again but on both sides so I was quite surprised actually because I didn't expect that so I bought this replacement as I said and the same thing happened although I have bent it back but I managed to get some some six point five millimeter steel bars from being key and I just got a blowtorch and heated up the joins and just made a steel frame so this one was a little too small so I actually took it off decided to have another go of it as you can see there on the hfx now actually have a slightly different frame it's a little bit wider but that's the steel one on there and that's 6.5 Mills steel and all that adds weight to the slingshot it kind of does it justice in a respect because it does make it incredibly durable and you can use heavy bands with it so theoretically I could actually take off this wrist brace and use the finger and thumb support style of shooting without worrying of bending forks but because I've become so accustomed to the frame I I'm a much better shot with it now so I have capped it on that yeah it's a great sling shot and with the with the heavy bands it really does pack a punch as a hunting slingshot even if you hit a you know small game in non-vital area with heavy ammo you're you're more likely to bring it down but as I say that's just my my methods a lot of people out there don't favor heavy bands or heavy ammo obviously ad cost and the heavy bands are obviously slower on their return but with a you want to sort of tax the rubber with heavy bands so it gives it that trajectory it gives it that that power

a lot of people out there use kind of flat bands and 9-mil lead you know which is a parent equality aa combination and so you may want to have a look at look at that as well so this is the new slingshot I've got there I do like this one actually it's very lightweight but very robust and you can actually hold it like this with a finger and thumb support style now you can actually you can actually draw it back like that you can also use it hammer grip style you know so it does counter for your cater I should say for different shooting styles but yes sir as I say it's made by Jack bull Martin hood he does have an eBay shop and he sells these for about 24 pounds so they're not very expensive and if you're looking for something's a little more traditional a little more a little bit more on the sort of bushcraft side then yes it so it's a really nice slingshot but I had it with Dan kun black at one point and that was actually a very good band set to have it with although it got damaged and broke surprisingly so I've got dub-dub blue on there now and that's probably better for EM for 14 mil LED but yeah very very good sling shot I would I would highly recommend them they can be used with flat bands as well as you can see he does supply them with flat bands you just request what you want any hand makes them and they arrive in about four days but really nice truehl finish so you know the weather is not gonna it's not going to ruin it so yeah great sling shot nice and lightweight this one here maybe the same made by my friend Lewis again and it may look a little crude but it's incredibly practical but um yeah excellent sling shot really I mean I used to have a much lighter band set on it I stop Donkin 580 or 50 80 soaring on it and yeah I think was a little bit more suited this Thera black is a little bit too heavy for it as you can see there's there's no sort of grip to grab there so tends to lean back quite a bit and you have to really kind of bring that forward so I have modified it slightly by drilling those holes just so I can put band sets on and the nice thing about when you drill holes and you have bands is you can carry a length of spare band it allows you just to adjust the length of a length of the band to to whatever you like really so I carry two spare bands with me whatever slingshot I bring out and I always cut them slightly longer than they need to be and that's just so that they can either cater for this style of slingshot all the hfx where you've got a lot of the band on the fork so obviously if I were putting it on this slingshot not so much of the band would be used in the actual frame and I could just cut the excess off say this is quite a versatile slingshot and I use this when I go for walks and just have it wrapped up in my pocket I probably will put Dan Cohen 5080 back on it and probably use of 12 mil lads with that which I find to be a good combination I stick to a few types of ammunition with my slingshots that's mainly just 14 mil lead across the board really but there'd be any one of these are just used 14 mil LEDs and when I'm practicing I just use 14 mil lad I use the same kind of ammunition all the time whether I'll be hunting whether I'll be practicing mainly just because I find that if I use a variety I start to get developing consistencies because there's a certain degree of drop as you fire the shot and that drop obviously that trajectory of a third of the ball its weight its size all that all sort of change that dynamic so just sticking to 14 more ladders has really improved my my shooting personally I do you recover the ammunition fortune unless it's hunting it's always a bit tricky to recover a me when you're hunting because some of the shots you take the you know the lead ball will disappear into the brush but by hanger hang a towel up on a bit of power cord or my scarf I usually put targets in front of that and I just take shots it and the lead drops tyne say it doesn't mean on I'm sort of polluting the environment launching LED balls all over the place you do have to recover as much of it as possible so yeah I stick to 14 mil leather do have some some a special ammunition as well I've been playing around with that some he steel these steel balls I mean that's 18 and 20 mil steel and that really is a me for you cited on hfx slingshot because of that these bands are normally heavy that you really need heavy ammunition to tax that rubber so it builds up that momentum and builds up that power if you're just firing a 12 mil steel ball or a 9 mil steel ball out of Doug Doug plum it's just not really going to be very efficient whatsoever I mean the common misconception is is that a really powerful bands mean you know really high velocity really powerful shots but it really doesn't quite work that way and you really want to match up the weight of the shot with the the weight of the band so you know very heavy tubes very heavy very heavy ammunition you know very light very light tubes maybe like a single lightweight flat BAM that's going to retract very quickly you know very light light steel ball you know and it would be incredibly fast not a very flat trajectory so if you're getting these heavy bands heavy ammo is the way to go going to use light fast retracting bands you want a lighter ammo so holding the slingshot is really going to be down to personal preference and also the type of slingshot you've got obviously will affect the way you hold it for me it's 45 degrees that's pretty much pretty much the way it goes for me I like drawing

five degrees I've tried 90 I don't really get on too well with 90 so you know when I when I draw I always just bring pouch to anchor point and the anchor point is basically the position in which you bring the page back to you we always want to bring the page back to that point the more you replicate the same picture the more accuracy you are the more consistency you'll have with your accuracy so for me it's usually all in one movement just bring bring pouch up bring the slingshot out to them to the aiming position and yeah and that's that's pretty much the way the way it gave to me and the target is usually over this side of me like that you know if I if I need to turn on some things I've seen a squirrel or whether I you just rotate the back foot and just always always draw the slingshot across my chest essentially but in terms of aiming I think I use a naming style called intuitive or instinctive aiming and if I try and explain that a bit every everybody has sort of like spatial awareness and if you just stand in a position and you see something and you point to it if you if you actually look down your arm you'll see that your your finger is pretty much pointing right at what you're looking at and then everybody has that sense while most people do anyway where you see something like a beer can lying on the ground you point it if you look down your arm you're literally pointing right at it and that's pretty much what intuitive shooting is it's it's some it's not sort of looking down the slingshot and aiming up and then letting go it's basically sort of shooting method that's that's favored with hunting because it is quite instinctive and when you're hunting you need to be quite instinctive because what you're aiming at generally doesn't want to be shot and it's going to try and get away from you

or it's scared or you know it might be on the move like a squirrel and that and that instinctive sort of aiming method really comes into it saying with hunting you're just walking along you spot something you draw you don't look at the slingshot you're just looking at the target but in one motion you bring the page back back to the anchor point and you just bring your arm straight out and most of the time I'd find that my accuracy is very good when I use that method it's when I start thinking too much about what I'm doing that I start to become inaccurate it's a bit like shooting clay pigeons like launch the clay up in the air if you try and aim you generally start to miss but the more instinctual something is the quicker it is in the morning you know the more trying to explain this more it kicks in in the back of your head and the less you actually consciously think about it the better it usually is so yeah I hope that makes sense but um yeah it's all I'll take a walk around in a minute because there's quite a lot of trash around here and our I'll just shoot a few targets that I walk around I'll see a bottle I'll take a shot and I kind of just show you what I mean about that instinctive shooting obviously I've set a few targets up to just you know just putting the trees and stuff and I'll walk about and you can sort of see what I mean

get an idea about that that aiming starting and you're not always going to hit the target but I mean you'll be very close to it the more you do this you'll start to miss within it you know if you've got a dinner plate and you put it over that target you know your shots will be zooming past the target and then yeah you'll be you'll be very accurate I'll try and sum a few of these things up just just kind of bring a bit of clarity or bring it all together so in terms of the slingshot itself I mean you're really going to have to kind of find your own feet with your comfort in terms of what you want to hold in your hand

everybody will try and sell you something different and I should think that just buy something inexpensive and play around with a few different frames make your own and you know and see what works for you and and go out and use it and the more you use it the more you'll just find your feet with the whole thing the more you'll get to know the slingshot you'll get to know the type of ammunition you use how it performs how the bands perform and the whole picture whole jigsaw just start to come together and that's all it is really it's just practice so as I say for me it's 45 degrees and I bring it to the back of my ear there you know my my target area really is just literally above the forks although I don't I don't self-consciously look above the fork so I just look at the target and that intuitive aim and there's some mud line though I don't know if you can see it but

so the shop literally tailed just above the mud so you know just just quite instinctive shots you know you let your you let your arm do the pointing as long as you bring your bring your draw arm back to that anchor point you're just replaying that picture again and again say yeah just practice but like I say okay I'll go for a walk and it's lazy trash all around here we're a people of just left cans and stuff so I'll then I'll take a few practice shots I'll just go for a walk and see something take a shot and yeah you can sort of get a better idea of what that sort of intuitive shooting is all about you

you

you

you

you

you

I hope this videos help some of you guys out with regards to cap of the methods I use and a few of the questions that you've had on various posts on some of the hunting videos if I was going to give any advice I probably just say that you know this is just my this is just my take really on on slingshot hunting and the way I do it it's not necessarily the right way for you but yeah it's good just just get out there and get yourself a slingshot and practice really that's the best thing you can do it's definitely the best thing you can do there's a lot of inexpensive models out there and you know you can just pick one up for sort of seven or eight pounds and go out and just play around with it and see what you reckon and if it doesn't suit you maybe try another one make your own you know and then get sort of caught up with this sort of craze on really heavy bands and big ammo I know I know I use heavy bands in large ammo but that's just my preferred style of hunting really I like I've become accurate enough that I like to use heavy ammo so if I hit something in a non vital area I know I'll bring it down and I can go and sort it out quick as quick as I can so it's not necessarily the right way to go again it's just my my take on things say yeah I hope you liked the video and got an idea of how intuitive shooting can sort of come into it saying it's really about just an instinct and not thinking too much about what you're doing or you know your brain can go crazy when you're about to take a shot if you're thinking too much about it you know calculating all kinds of things you you're looking at the slingshot you're looking at a target you suddenly all these things are popping into your brain just just try not to do that and I know it's difficult to say I mean I still do it but just yeah you know when a shot will feel right when you take that shot and you hit that target you'll know why it worked and you'll barely be able to remember actually what you did when you took the shot that's generally the way it gave the instinctive shooting I find you well I find anyway even with using a shotgun like it will just be spur-of-the-moment and you suddenly think I've got it and you try and replay that image back in your mind if what actually happened and how you actually took that shot and you won't really be able to picture it too well so but anyway my face is getting cold one I need to get out of here so hope you hope you liked the video and yeah thanks again and thank you to all my subscribers and everybody out there I really appreciate it and yeah take care guys