Guns of the legends Collection

  • If you search on Spearboard then you will find a "supercharging" lever rollergun there built from scratch, but with a more modern handle. The French Hurricane company also made a pistol grip version of the same gun a little later. The important thing is to swing the lever with the bands not under a lot of initial tension as otherwise the lever is too hard to pull back. Also when going over the center like a toggle action the lever can snap downwards like a rat trap closing, so watch out. An experimental rollergun based on the supercharging lever idea before this French gun was discovered (many ideas in spearfishing unwittingly get reinvented) nearly chopped the operator's fingers off, so caution is needed with more modern high modulus bands.

  • I cannot remember if this "Fusil Americain" rollergun has been posted here before, but this canon uses rubber band power to drive an impeller unit that slides in a top slotted barrel. The gun has four shooting powers and a supercharging lever and can be used as both a rear handle gun and a mid-handle gun. Based on two spring gun handles this gun was a product of the "USA" company based in France which made many models of spring guns. Alexandre Kramarenko and Charles Henry Wilen formed that company when in 1937 they made the first ever spring gun, and in the patent records the first ever underwater speargun. This gun was heavy and expensive and the one shown here was given to Jack Prodanovich for his consideration and appraisal, but Jack never used it as he thought it was overly complicated and rather cumbersome. Of course Jack made his own line of spearguns in his workshop that are also collector's items and they were a better proposition for spearfishing than this gadget was. Still it is an impressive gun and demonstrates the inventiveness of the first generation of spearfishermen.



    Checking back I showed the patent drawings here, but not the photo of the gun as it was still locked up in my old computer.

    Don Paul >Spearguns fusiles Vintage Españoles

  • This rubber powered spear pistol is a tail pusher speargun using the Nemrod spring gun handle. When cocked to shoot the spear protrudes out the rear end as much as it does at the front end of the gun. The bands mount on the grip handle and run back to a tail cap that sits on the spear tail. There were many guns like this in the early days, but they only had a short power stroke so were not long range shooters. The side rollers direct the run of the bands to align with the spear when stretched out with the gun cocked.

  • Here is another of these tail pusher spearguns, the "Christie", which has a brace for supporting the gun against the shoulder during the shot. The Australian company "Undersee Products" made a series of cast alloy guns using a similar layout such as the "Comet" and the "Bantam". The "Comet" is shown below with the spear slid forwards in the gun. You can see that the design moves the handgrip further back in the gun and away from the band anchor point.

  • I found this advert for a gun that I have seen the ruins of and thought that it was displayed on this thread, but it does not look like it after checking through the various pages. Of interest as it shows that many rifle-like fishing weapons are not underwater guns, but terrestrial weapons for shooting fish from the riverbank. However it is a side-slotted barrel gun with a tail pusher for driving the spear shaft and some of the earliest guns used underwater tried this layout when competing with the tube based internal spring powered spearguns. Note the two vertical prongs mid-stock which catch the driving band rubber and decelerate the pusher unit before it reaches the end of travel in the barrel, the restretching band creating the necessary deceleration.

    When sling powered Arbaletes appeared (the modern band gun) these side-slotted barrel guns virtually disappeared.

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