Yet another paracord post/tutorial...
Like many of you, I enjoy paracord and making stuff with it. Especially gun stuff. I also like getting information for free (like from this website). So I've decided to pay my information debts back to the forum in the form of a tutorial. This design not only looks neat, but it's extremely easy to unravel in case SHTF and you need a whole bunch of paracord immediately. Now if you've seen something like this elsewhere, you can scroll right along, but if it's new to you then by all means try it out.
1) THe first thing you need to do is gather your materials: A knife, a lighter, something to start the sling on, and some paracord (it took me roughly 1.5 feet of cord per inch of sling, but YMMV)
2) Next, take whatever you're starting off of (a belt buckle, sling swivel etc.) and make 4 loops around it and tie off one end. (Be sure you melt the end of the paracord so it dosen't unravel)
The long end going out of the picture is attached to the long hank of paracord shown in the 1st picture so there's no need to cut it to a specific length beforehand. This long end will be your working end.
3) So once you've made the 4 loose loops around the starting point, take the working end and fold it together into a loop as shown:
4) Then you take this loop and stuff it through the 4 initial loops you made like so:
5)Next, you cinch down the 4 loops (not too tight though):
6) Then, you separate the cinched down loops and pull up 4 more loops through these openings. (Hard to explain, this video does it well though):
7)Once you've done this, you take all the loops and rotate them counter-clockwise (the left side of each loop should be facing you). If you forget one of them and it goes clockwise, it looks pretty bad so don't do that.
8) Next, you take a pinch of the working end and make a loop with it
9) Then you take this loop and stuff it through the 4 loops you've created (sounding familiar?)
10) Continue steps 5-9 until you either reach the desired length, or run out of paracord. One word of warning though, you will get twists in the cord. Because you're looping and twisting the cord, it'll get kind of bunched up. You want to periodically get these twists out of the weave by pulling them though to the working end, and shaking them out. Otherwise you'll end up with a sloppy weave.
The first 5 inches are generally pretty terrible, so weave 5 inches or so and if it looks crappy, just pull on the working end to unzip it and start again. No sense in making a sling if several inches of it look like a disaster.
Once you get the hang of it, it's really fast. I made the sling in about 3 hours (first weave), and I made my belt in about two. Both were about 36" long and they both took slightly under 50' of cord each, which was nice because I had a 100' length of cord.
12) Once you've reached your target length, cut about 1' of extra paracord and loop around your swivel 4-5 times. Be sure to fuse both ends of the paracord so they don't unravel. Now you can either tie a knot at the top of the swivel or weave the excess back into the sling (this is what I did because I think it looks better than a big 'ol knot at the end).
Now if you're making a belt and not a sling, I weaved a layer of 3 loops instead of 4 to taper the end, and then I wrapped it back upon itself a couple of times to round the end. The end is really up to you, so tie whatever knots or abominations of knots that you want to finish it off. Just make it look good to you.
Here's what the finished product should look like:
(the only belt buckle I had lying around was a big shiny one I won in a trap competition last year)
Anyway, hope this helped. If you want more info, check this instructable out, and also the video I linked to earlier.
Cheers!
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