FEATURE SLINGS
SLING YER HOOK! “THIS MONTH’S MISSIVE IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY BAGELS, CHEESE AND MARMALADE!” ACTUALLY IT’S BROUGHT TO YOU BY FRENCHIE WHO TOLD US THAT HE IS POWERED BY THE DELICACIES ABOVE, FOCUSSING HIS MIND ON THE MANY YEARS HE’S BEEN AROUND AIRSOFT! THIS MONTH HE TURNS THAT FOCUS TO SOMETHING WE ALL NEED AND USE, SLINGS!
A
irsoft is a great pastime for teaching you new skills; tactical skills, co-operation, camouflage and convincing yourself that you’re having fun when you are p*ss-wet through and it’s blowing a gale. I’m going to add an additional skill to this short list - sewing. Yup, good old needle and thread skills. If you don’t have them, learn them. You don’t need anything fancy but the ability to securely fasten bits of material together is a bit of a godsend. To understand why I think this is the case, it’ll help if I tell you I was thinking about writing about slings this month. Now whether or not I can do so for the necessary number of words remains to be seen, but what’s life without a challenge? Being willing to rip things apart and rework them to suit your RIFs and your playing style is more than just handy, it can make a real difference to how well any given RIF works for you. When I started playing, I didn’t really care too much about slings, in truth I struggle to remember what if anything I actually used. There is also a strong argument for always having your “long” in your hands, and if you do that, who needs a sling, right? I also suspect that the variety of slings was a deal more limited than it is today and the quality leaned towards the amateur end of the scale. There were also good reasons not to sling some of the earlier airsoft guns; Marui M16s were notable for their flexibility at the barrel/receiver joint and stressing this with a sling could be a very expensive mistake. I do however have distinct memories of taking a standard three-point sling, most likely a Viper or some such, and ripping 84
JANUARY 2022
it to bits to create a sling for my very first F1 Famas. Now, for those of you unfamiliar with the F1, it has excellent fixed sling loops at the butt, and nothing at all at the front end. Actually, that isn’t quite true. There is a very proprietary connection on the bipod hinge to which the real sling attaches, but I don’t think anyone I played with at the time had even seen a real FAMAS sling. (As an aside, just before I left airsoft retail, I was given a genuine FAMAS sling by a friend. Foolishly, in an act of misguided kindness, I lent it to a young player with a FAMAS, and reminded them to return it. They never did, and so if you’re out there and happen to read this: Bast*rd!). Back to the past; my solution was to unpick large chunks of the stock sling and create an attachment point which went around the front of the FAMAS’s distinctive handle. This involved a degree of sewing and the result was rock solid and served me well through a number of these guns. My own stitching skills never stretched to major alterations to clothing of tactical gear and I can’t use a sewing machine. I wish I could, I could probably have had a nice sideline in customising gear for players. As it was a lot of my needle time was directed to making slings more useful.
THE CIRCLE OF SLINGS
Just like most players over a period of airsofting I have worked my way through the various stages of sling: The awful one that came in the box; the marginally better one I bought online, my first three-point sling, a good three point sling, a single point sling, many
