We recently had the opportunity to test out a new product designed to keep your crossbow (or rifle) from falling off your shoulder. The Hunting Revolution Sling-on is basically a cross body attachment for your crossbow sling. It utilizes a small neoprene strap that attaches to your sling to hold the crossbow against your body and eliminates the crossbow from falling off your shoulder (and also eliminates that nagging feeling that your crossbow is slipping of your shoulder as well!).
Materials
The Sling-on is made from a stretchy neoprene strap with a heavy duty plastic buckle to attach the two pieces together. At the opposite end from the buckle on each piece is a short loop made from a thick braided line. The overall feel when we took the Sling-on out of the package was that it was well constructed while remaining light weight.
Design
The Sling-on is basically composed of two pieces of neoprene strap, each with a plastic buckle on one end and a loop on the other with each loop end attaching to a part of your crossbow sling (when you see the directions, this sentence will make a lot more sense!). The long piece attaches to the top of your sling by means of a loop with a sliding plastic bead that locks it into place. The other end uses about a 2-inch strap with a longer loop that goes around the midpoint of your sling and pulls tight to hold it in place.
Ease of Installation
When you read the directions, it might take a few seconds to fully understand what they are wanting you to do. We would recommend having your crossbow, with your current sling attached, on a table or workbench as you look at the directions. This will help the directions to be very quick and simple to understand. Doing it this way, we found the Sling-on to be very straight forward and actually a bit intuitive to install, once you understand how the Sling-on works.
Color
The Sling-on is a black on black strap with black loops and earth brown lettering. It has the neutral coloring to complement just about any gear, and is not going to hinder your camo patterns in hunting situations.
Comfort
We found the Sling-on to be quite comfortable to use. The fact that the strap offers a bit of stretch makes it more comfortable as it pulls your crossbow in towards your body. Without that stretch, we really think it would start to bite into your side after a while, but for the 20 minutes or so that we had it attached to test how well it held the crossbow and for pictures, we never felt any of the cutting-into-your-side feeling we might have expected. One result we really liked was that the crossbow never felt like it wanted to fall off the shoulder. That made for a more secure feeling and also for a shoulder that didn’t get tired from having to lift it a bit to keep the sling in place like we normally might have done. Knowing that some shooters sling their crossbow face up while others have the business end pointing down, we mounted the strap both ways and found it was good to go in either orientation.
Ease of Use
We found the Sling-on easy to use once we played with it for a few minutes. The way that the strap dangles from the top of your sling when the plastic buckles are disconnected means that you need to be able to reach behind you with your free hand to grab it and pull it under your arm to connect with the buckle on the mid-sling piece. This was a bit awkward the first try, but once we figured out where to place it when slinging the crossbow, it wasn’t difficult at all. Once you get the length set properly and know where to reach behind your back, you will find it only takes a couple of seconds to sling on (yes, we know…but bad jokes are just part of it!). The images below show attaching the Sling-on in both up and down orientation.
Overall Thoughts
The Sling-on is a great answer to a problem that many of us deal with in terms of your weapon wanting to fall off your shoulder when slinged. It accomplishes its result without having to alter your weapon or sling permanently, and also does so with a reasonable amount of comfort (we tested it with only a light shirt on…heavier hunting clothing will inevitably offer more padding and thus more comfort). It is inexpensive, easy to install and use, and more importantly, it works.
Just to know how it would work in a hunting situation, we left it on while we brought the crossbow up to a firing position. We found that if you reattach the buckles after taking the crossbow off your shoulder, the Sling-on matched the position of the sling as it was wrapped around the forward hand forearm and did not interfere with firing in any way. All in all, this would be a good product to sling on your crossbow (yup…we went there again!).
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