The Shepard Sling

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I often wondered about how a skinny young man named David could have killed a giant with a shepard sling made of leather. After thinking about it for a while and experimenting a little, I was convinced it was so.

 

 

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The Shepard Sling

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Probably the most famous story about the Shepard Sling was from the bible. David used his Shepard Sling to slay the Philistine giant warrior with a single stone expertly directed to hit the giant between the eyes and put him down. I always wondered if perhaps this story was a bit of an exaggeration until I got to investigating when I was about twelve years old on Stark Street in Phillips, Texas.

Could this skinny young man really have put that giant down with that meager looking weapon?

 

 

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The device David used was very simple and it could be carried in his shepards bag. It was made of leather straps for the sling arms with a leather pouch large enough to hold a 3 inch stone. A stone was put in the pouch and the Shepard sling was swung around the head three or four times building velocity. One of the leather straps was released at precisely the correct time to send the stone towards its target. The centrifugal force generated by swinging the stone released the stone at a very high velocity making it lethal to any nearby target. The stone would hit the target with probably ten times the force of a hand thrown stone.

Two leather straps, a leather pouch, and a large stone. It doesn’t look that lethal on first glance.

 

 

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When I began to experiment with the Shepard Sling, I built a version using parachute chord for the swing arms and a large leather pouch for the stone. At first, I had trouble releasing the chord at the right time, so I made some modifications. I put a loop in one swing arm so I could slip it over my index finger so I wouldn’t let go of the wrong arm. I also tied a knot in the the other swing arm so it wouldn’t slip out until I got ready to release it. This helped a lot and soon I got pretty good at hitting my target. We had a round eight foot incinerator vessel made 3/8 inch steel. I loaded a three inch stone in the device and hit the side of the incinerator with the stone. The force shattered the stone and put a large dent in the side of the incinerator. I decided this was no kids toy, but a deadly weapon capable of killing what ever it hit. I could throw a large stone 500 yards with the sling with out much effort. So I decided to leave it alone and packed it away

My version of the Shepard Sling which turned out to be a seriously deadly weapon so I packed it away.

 

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Several kids in the neighborhood had seen me messing with my shepard sling and had made their own versions to use on their own. So there were large stones flying all over the neighborhood for a while. One day I was in the back yard messing around and I was headed up the back steps when something hit me in the back below the left shoulder blade with such force that it knocked me off the porch onto my face. I was gasping for air unable to breathe for about five minutes. After about ten minutes I was able to sit up and thought about what had happened. Then I saw a 2 inch stone laying on the grass and I knew I had been hit by a stone from some other kids shepard sling that had almost done me in. A flight path just four inches to the right and eight inches up would have crushed my skull and splattered gray matter. The stone had probably traveled 4 or 5 hundred yards before it hit me in the back

 

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So there was no doubt in my mind that the Shepard Sling could indeed slay the giant as documented in the bible.

 

 

 

 

Thanks for reading The Shepard Sling,

Bill