Selecting and tuning bands

Picking bands is not unlike buying a car. You can buy a 2-seat sports car with a high state of tune, or a reliable family sedan. Of course, we all picture ourselves behind the wheel of the sportster drifting around mountain roads, but in reality it might not be the best thing for the daily commute or for towing a boat to the lake. Let's imagine a fast band. It's made of Thera-band black, blue or even thinner elastic. It's narrow and aggressively tapered and drawn right to the elastic limit. At the back is the tiniest pouch made of a slip of skived leather and shoots 8mm polished steel ball. With this, you can get super velocities for flat trajectories and less drop, but all these attributes come at a cost. The first is obviously reliability; the parts are at their limit and will wear out or fail quickly. The second is a lot less obvious: it may be less accurate. When rubber approaches the elastic limit more pulling results in less elongation and it gets more finicky, magnifying any imbalance in elastic material, band cutting, pouch position and release method. As the velocity is fast, the slightest spin, wobble, etc. Will be magnified in flight and you need smooth, round ammo. The third penalty is fairly obscure and you'd only know it if you've done lots of systematic chrony testing: all these factors that make it fast make it sensitive to projectile weight. This doesn't matter at all if you are shooting from a bucket full of identical ball bearings, but the difference between two pebbles can be surprisingly great.So, if you're in the bush and need to shoot pebbles, maybe you're best with a slower band that shoots a wide range of projectile weights with a similar velocity and doesn't send irregular shaped pebbles shanking off into the bushes.Good bands for this might be A+ Slingshots' natural rubber bands, tubular bands or Gold Winners. Tex-Shooter's Express Bands are fine bands as well. Hunter Bands or Ultra Bands are hard to draw but very tolerant. What if you're stuck with extremely fast bands and you're off for a long hike? You should draw out a little less (improving reliability, accuracy and sensitivity to ammo variance) and then choose: light pebbles will give you back some speed, but heavier rocks will vary less in velocity and carry more energy.In the same way, my standard bands can be tuned to shoot fast or slow. I call them Fastbands, because they can reach 80-90m/s, but if you let out the elastic to its full length so they shoot a bit slack, they can be made much more docile and forgiving.I've published detailed charts of velocity vs mass for my bands in all combinations of length and elongation that people will likely use. People can pick how they want their slingshot to behave and string it accordingly. I plan to publish basic charts for various bands that I have bought, but it wastes a lot of time, so I encourage the commercial makers of both retail and custom bands to do their own detailed testing so that users can tune their bands.I'll take this opportunity to recommend Flatband's custom bands again. Along with Tex/Bill, Gary is the most knowledgeable and experienced band designer/maker around and Gary will ask you. 20 questions and do all the calculations and make you a bespoke slingshot that is optimised to your needs. From there, you either shoot it as specified, or chrony it with a range of shot weights to see how it responds to different projectile weights.