Salmo,

1. Light a candle (this is actually NOT a joke).
2. Take the parachute cord and hold it with some needle nose pliars with a little tag end of cord coming out one side of the pliars.
3. Hold the tag end of cord over the candle. It will melt/smoke/catch on fire until it burns up to the edge of your pliars.
4. Cut several feet of cord so you now have one end sealed and the other end open.
5. Stuff a bunch of that shot into the open end of the cord. It can be a PITA but slide them down towards the sealed end. Now, you should have a giant string of cord with shot that you can make into a bunch of slinkies.
6 . Start making different size slinkies. I'd say I use more "5 ball" and "7 ball" slinkies than anything else but I go as low as 3 and as high as 14. I try to get the biggest shot I can get at the store so the shot size obviously matters too.
7. Sealing off the other end is similar to what you did in step 3. You generally want them tight so they look like a sausage and not like an orange in a gym sock.

I generally just attach them to my swivel by getting the swivel through some of the cord. Other people are more refined and actually burn/punch a hold through the cord. Slinkies are noticably less dense than standard lead and they take a lot of the traditional "feel" of drift fishing away because there isn't much of a "tick tick" feeling and the distinction between bites and the tapping/ticking isn't usually as pronounced. Once you get used to it though, I'm firmly convinced it is a better way for most drift fishing as you will lose less gear. I usually grab a couple of the most common sizes out of my box and either throw them my vest or the front of the boat so I can quickly swap sizes just like people do with pencil lead.

-AP