Saunders Archery contacted us just as we were getting finalised on issue three of Slingshot World magazine. Saunders are a serious outfit who make well engineered products for their core market but who are also proper slingshot enthusiasts, as keen as anybody ever.
And Saunders’ history in slingshots and the people who make them, goes way back. I had the privilege of a lovely long chat with Chuck Saunders, who you can see in the company videos and learned a lot.
The upshot was that I have been sent a crate of kit, because we have a new player with a distinct new flavour in the UK slingshot market. The owner of the ‘Wrist-Rocket” brand, these guys have been legendary for their tube slings, like Barnett have been here in the UK, for ever. But now, they have developed a whole eco-system of flat band slingshots.
Saunders style is to make the band fitment easy as pie, to make the bands last as long as possible and to be truly simple to shoot, with as many human variables removed as possible. This has locked them in to a large ammo standard of 0.44 cal or 0.50 cal, which is pretty phat by the new international contest standards.
First, check out the kit I was sent:
Now, here are Mark Clark and John Jeffries, shooting Saunders slingshots and then trying 0.50 calibre balls in their 8mm full maxed target set ups! (Mark broke a bandset doing this!)
The ammo is called CLOD-POPPERS and while I have tried the ones WASP sell and also the iron oxide weighted ones from China, these are a bigger, badder and better flying ball. They certainly impressed Mark Clark, as you can hear from the chuckling in this video:
And since you are here, I figured you would want to see the slingshots that were at the Shooting Show recently (as seen in an earlier video) but better and closer up. So, knowing John was coming along to have a shoot with Mark, I asked him to bring his stock. What you cannot see in the video below is quite how horribbly uncomfortable John was to have all the catapults just lain atop the box, since each had its own snug foam lined home in that security case. But I was as careful as an Antiques Roadshow presenter. (They nicked my AR initials logo, of course…) These are just bloody gorgeous.
All of this was videoed at Tillingbourne Trout Farm and smokery. Where you can eat FRESH trout and rent a Barbecue to cook yours upon, right there. Catch, kill, cook, eat all within the hour! They even gut and clean the fish for you and supply simple pole tackle. The smokery on site is the oldest in Surrey and turns out delicious smoked salmon, trout, eels, venison, pheasant and partridge breasts. They sell awesome tracklements and preserves often soaked in booze as well as frozen high end seafood. All that and game dealers, too. Sigh.
