Band powered "spring gun" format 1943

This French band gun is the subject of a patent in 1943 (diagram shown), when France was under occupation by German forces during World War II, but not necessarily in the Sud (South) of France. I have never seen one, but I am sure that it existed, even if only as a prototype. The overall proportions of the gun are similar to a spring gun, but it has a rectangular section metal barrel tube, being a "semi-enclosed track" band gun with a spear tail driving device instead of a wishbone. The unique trigger mechanism features a "double demultiplier" action, which means that the sear lever and trigger both confer mechanical advantage, thereby improving the trigger mechanism's leverage to reduce trigger pull. We take such things for granted today, but that was not the case back in 1943. I wonder if Cyril has ever seen one, or if any of the other French speargun collectors contributing to the "guns of the legends" thread have any knowledge of it. I have produced a second diagram showing the trigger mechanism's action and that of the unusual internal lever arm link to the line release lever. Note that the line release lever is also used to reset the position of the twin sear teeth and latches the trigger mechanism for the next shot, after first inserting the spear into the gun.

Quote from LunkerBuster

whoa. that is really cool..I cannot imagine how annoying chaning the band would be

You would have been so engrossed with the novelty of using an underwater weapon of completely novel construction that you would have hardly worried about changing the bands. There is no Rene Cavelero "Arbalete" available yet (that design was only registered in 1943) and the only spearguns being used are the many spring guns produced pre-war (e.g. United Service Agency: Kramarenko and Wilen's compression spring gun) and the various home-made efforts built around side slotted tube barrels with wooden rifle-like stocks. Bands are made from rubber items manufactured for other purposes, such as automotive belts and straps, hence early spearguns often use square or rectangular cross section bands. It is the dawn of spearfishing as a sport which will flourish once the war ends. That said, bands don't last long and are not very powerful due to the type of rubber used back then. Sometimes bands would stretch and not return to their original size or would break.

A side slotted barrel gun using loop bands designed by Le Prieur, it is designed for shooting from the surface, hence the bulky wooden stock. Le Prieur designed a full face mask with snorkels built into either side, you used it to look down and shoot the fish swimming below. The snorkels had multiple bore tubes and looked like antlers grouped together at the top where they were all fixed together. Air went in on one side and exhausted from the other. A very early gun and it has a patent, as does the dive mask.

The spring gun handle shows that this is someone else's realization of this weapon, but the idea is from Le Prieur.

The diagram is attached showing the original handle and optional shoulder stock.

The significance of Yves Le Prieur's gun is that it is one of the first band guns, "demande le 9 decembre 1938", but only published in 1940. The priority date is the 1938 date, but Alexandre Kramarenko got to the patent office first with his spring gun in 1937, so his gun is usually acknowledged as the first speargun. If you take power operated fishing gigs as a starting point then they pre-date spearguns, but the spear never fully leaves the gig. It was a small leap to putting a grip handle on the gig, installing a trigger and letting the shaft fly free of the muzzle. Goggles gave you underwater vision, they have been around for centuries and now you had a weapon that could strike faster and harder than a hand propelled spear or harpoon. Guy Gilpatric was concerned that people could now spear fish without getting the back of their head wet and Yves Le Prieur in a sense obliged him. You would be a brave man to attempt a surface dive with his "antler snorkeled" dive mask as your continued ability to breathe on surfacing was dependent on eliminating water from the mask, one-way valves on three intake tubes on one side let air in (and water too if the snorkel tips were submerged) and three one-way valves let air out of the three exhaust tubes on the other side. So not really a "dive" mask at all, more a personal underwater viewing window. Le Prieur was an accomplished engineer and inventor, he saw this as a surface activity rather than submerged underwater hunting with his free-flow breathing set using compressed air and his "Nautilus" gun, a cartridge powered underwater rifle. You can read all about this in the "Compleat Goggler", Gilpatric's book, if you can still find a copy not snapped up by old book collectors! Jules Verne would have been pleased as his underwater hunters had been blazing away underwater for years with their compressed air guns under the looming bulk of the Nautilus hovering about the bottom, while illuminating the benthic scene with "electric lamps of the latest pattern".

Quote from Dan

Pete, you are an encyclopaedia of spearguns. Thanks for your contributions.

Well thank you Dan for the forum to put it up in! This knowledge is going "over the horizon" fast, so unless it gets written down it will be forgotten as old-timers head for that "big reef in the sky", or somewhere slightly warmer depending if they have been good or not!

I still hope to locate the "D&F" (not its real name) 1943 gun as some parts of the design would have to come from experience, not theory, as that front curved line wrap hook is to avoid line snags as shooting line pulls off the line release lever behind it. Also the small spur on the trigger finger guard is to allow a reverse hand hold on the handle when cranking the line release lever to latch up the trigger, they don't actually tell you that in the patent, but that is what the spur is there for, to rest your thumb on it.

The 1943 enclosed track band gun has been found! Cyril has sent me some photos of it which he will hopefully post here. So the gun does exist.

The elaborate front sights have been eliminated from the gun and the muzzle band anchor will have been changed, but the bands shown here may not be original (plastic ferrules?). A shaft tab has been added to the spear tail in place of the original spear tail drive unit which was like a 90 degree bent over bolt with a flat domed head that slid in the enclosed track's upper slot.

I have now seen some photos of an even earlier version which actually has the name molded on it: "Espadon" or "Swordfish". Monsieur Dedieu has his name on the other side of the handgrip, whereas these first photos showed a plain looking grip, so the gun must have been manufactured for long enough to effect these detail changes.

Thanks Don! Apparently this gun was called the "Espadon", there is an earlier version with a fully cast handle with integral trigger finger guard which looks even more like the patent diagram. That gun has the "Espadon" name on the grip handle on one side and M. Dedieu's name on the opposite side of the gun.

It was just a case of the separate information strands all coming together.

Here is the earlier version with the schematic superimposed on top. Images are scaled to the height of the stock in both cases. The actual grip is slightly smaller, the patent image was probably stretched for clarity of the parts details. The gun was for use around rocks, hence its short length. L'Espadon is a Swordfish.

I rearranged the drawing to show how the bands are pressed onto the prongs on the muzzle, being trussed together to form small loops at the front. The ring sight on the muzzle serves as a band catcher if the tail driver unit flies forward and out of the track. The spear shaft is round, but has a square tail notched on either side for the twin sear teeth to grab onto. A tubular line slide holds the spear centralized in the front of the track which is of a square cross-section. Virtually everything is there that we would expect to see in a speargun today, but this is in 1943.

After the war has ended the bands are changed to anchor in holes in a more conventional (for the time) vertical muzzle plate. Most of the gun production seems to have remained in France, but the Cavalero Champion Arbalete and the similar Beuchat Peche Sport models would have been the dominant band guns of that era and through into the late fifties/early sixties.

For interest here is the 1942 design that inventors Dedieu and Foglia patented before they produced the metal body "Espadon" shown above. The common element is the line release system which frees multiple line wraps when the gun shoots. Here the gun has a timber body, a winged spear tail rides in an enclosed track which is opened out at the front to aid spear insertion. When you pull the trigger the spear and line release lever are fired simultaneously. Short shafts were abandoned once long shafts were found to have better stability in flight when towing a shooting line and they had more damaging impact on the target.