Scout™ Modification – Shaping the Scout™ To Fit Your Hand

So for most people, the Scout™ fits the hand just fine. But did you know you can take the fit of the Scout™ to a whole new level? You can, and after watching this video, you can do it yourself, and your Scout™ will fit your hand like a glove.

“When a lot of folks get their Scout™ Slingshot, it fits most people pretty darn well, but you can modify it. So I want to show you a few things that can be done to modify the Scout and make it fit your hand even better. First, we’re going to go around to the back of the slingshot, and we’re going to contour this area a little more so that I get a much tighter grip. That way, these two fingers and this finger here do most of the holding. So we’re going to shave this down a little bit with simple shop tools. Take a look at the tools we’re going to use: just files, rasps, and sandpaper.

I’m going to start with a rat-tail file. Put in the vice here, and do a little shaping. Alright, so one thing that you can’t shape is the actual rubber, so we can only work with the nylon part of the slingshot. We can see that we’ve started to bring this up a little bit more, and my fingers can wrap around the forks a little bit more smoothly. So now we’re going to do the same thing to the other side.

Okay, we’ve got it fairly symmetrical, but we’re not worried about symmetry here; we’re worried about it fitting your particular hand. That feels so much better. I’m able to get much more of a grip through here and rap this knuckle a little bit more so that’s starting to feel really good. I’m not going to take that too much further.

For folks who have Hitchhiker’s thumb, this area right here can be a little bit uncomfortable. Also, for folks who are aging or don’t have a lot of meat on their thumb, this area of the slingshot can be a little bit pointy. So let’s soften this up right here. For this, I’m going to go to a slightly smaller file. All right, so we can see here that we’ve taken off this ridge here that was present on this side, and it’s provided a much flatter surface for the thumb.

Suppose you’re a pinch grip shooter, and you prefer to shoot your slingshot with a pinch-grip. We can soften up these edges here, all the way around to the back, so that you have a nice consistent grip there for your thumb and your forefinger. You can see that that’s got that nice and smooth edge. We’ve taken off the steep bevel and just smoothed that around, which gives it a nice surface for a pinch grip and also enhances the thumb support. I’m going to do the same thing on the other side. All right, so now that we’ve got a nice smooth radius here, no more of that steep edge. That feels good in the pinch grip. I might actually take that a little bit further back from my thumb. Being a right-hand holder, the forefinger area feels really good there. We’ve shaped this down a bit and developed a nice custom fit.

The key here is to take your time to shape your slingshot to fit your hand.

Next, let’s step down and get it back to looking smooth again, going from the rat-tail file to a chainsaw file. Now that we’ve got this back spot just about as smooth as it was from the factory, we can take that a little bit further with a piece of 80-grit Emery cloth. All right, now we’ve brought it back into a nice shape and really softened the edges. Again, you’re building this to fit you better, so if it doesn’t feel right in a particular place, come back and take off more material. This feels pretty doggone good for me and the way I like to shoot, so I’m going to go ahead and clean it up by stepping down to some 220 Emery cloth.

Alright, it’s back to being as smooth as it was fresh from the mold from the factory before we modified it. We’ve cut some nice symmetry, making a bit more room for our fingers and hands. This is great if you have smaller than average hands, or for ladies, you can bring this down if you prefer. All right, I’m just going to clean this with acetone.

As you can see, we can barely tell that we’ve modified it. Of course, we could take a little bit more time with the sanding and bring out any of those scratch marks, and blend everything together, and then finally, we can flame-polish with a torch. Now you can hardly tell that we’ve modified it.

The Scout is an ever-adaptable slingshot that you can make your own!”

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