I recently bought a tennis-ball catapult, for the benefit of a
visiting dog. It's not as good as I'd hoped.
This is the Hyper-Pet Hyperdog 4-ball launcher. It's a decently
strong (and quite heavy) slingshot with a wrist brace, sized for
tennis balls.
That frame containing balls isn't any sort of automatic feeder; you
take the ball out of it, move it to the sling, pull back and release.
(Hyper-Pet balls are slightly smaller than standard, though standard
ones will work with a bit more force.) Which is all fine, though it
does mean that your off-hand gets covered with dog slobber.
The problem is, this is competing with a conventional ball-flinger at
around one-sixth the price:
and that doesn't require you to touch the ball each time; it's also
longer, so you don't have to reach down as far to pick the thing up.
(Though it doesn't have storage for spare balls.)
But those are minor concerns. What about the range? "Up to 220 feet",
they say. Well, I'm a reasonably large person, and I can draw the
sling back to touch my head. But the rubber simply isn't elastic
enough; the draw is too easy, and the resulting lob frankly pathetic.
I haven't measured the actual range, but I can get around half as far
again with the standard flinger. This could be fixed with better
elastic, or possibly by doubling or tripling up on the existing stuff.
It's still great fun to use, but the actual results are distinctly
disappointing.
Comments on this post are now closed. If you have particular grounds for adding a late comment, comment on a more recent post quoting the URL of this one.