JBL spearguns

    The JBL elite out of the box has shot way better than any of the riffe guns I've shot set up to factory standards.
    I have since bought another of of chris's guns to replace the JBL elite, but I did take whites with it to 55lbs and my little brother now dives with the gun. Next week he should kill plenty of grouper and maybe some yellows with it.
    If you want a wood gun they are unbeatable for the price.

    Quote from Dan

    Good info, thanks Phil. Probably a great mech for a bluewater gun, but more of a hindrance than an advantage for a two band speargun. The top of the mech housing being round, I can't remember if the notch has to be purposefully aligned down, which would not be intuitive. Correct me if I'm wrong on this.


    that is correct but with the depth of the track the shark fins on the shaft line it up enuff for it to pop in. it is a little over kill for a 2-3 band gun but it is a very smooth firing mech
    phil

    A few comments on spearstuff's post. The JBL "Woodie" with the knuckle guard "Magnum" grip is/was a molded plastic grip housing, not metal. The trigger mechanism used in it is a variation on the one used in the cast alloy metal grip tube guns with a slight change in mechanism gearing, the emphasis being on slight. The problem is the trigger and sear lever pivot pins are set too close together and that limits the length of the sear lever tail. In the "Woodie" version, which is a later gun than the metal tube gun, but conceptually based on it, the pivot pins were spaced very slightly further apart, but the overall appearance of the mechanism levers is very similar. In the plastic housing the levers tend to catch on the ribbed cheeks of the grip housing that the levers sweep past on either side, that does not occur in the alloy grip. The "Carbine" series are single-piece trigger guns which is a very old design, in fact all early band spearguns use single-piece triggers with the "pull down sear lever" types (two-piece mech similar to a spring gun) eventually replacing them in guns such as the Champion "Arbalete" and licensed clones of that gun made in the USA by Voit, US Divers and Healthways.


    The JBL guns are actually Swimaster-Voit guns, but when the latter got out of spearfishing (spearfishing was deemed "bad" image-wise for the growing number of conservation minded scuba customers) Joe LaMonica (I hope I have spelt his name correctly) decided to continue building them under his own name. Jeff Skinner acquired the JBL company a few years ago from Larry, Joe's son, and has since been making changes.


    The Kitto designed (its history is documented elsewhere) three lever trigger mechanism "M7" (it was the "M6"), and now or soon to be "M8", has been put into the new JBL "Woodie" gun to build some track record with the trigger mechanism, which will not be overly taxed in that gun, but will give it some production volume and is a marketable differentiation for that product compared to its rivals. The aim is a lower trigger pull due to it being more highly geared than conventional two-piece trigger mechanisms.

    Edited 4 times, last by popgun pete: typo, closed the bracket ().

    Interesting history, thanks Pete.


    Here's some of my own history. My first speargun was a Mares Cyrano 970. I bought it after my first experience spearfishing with a hand spear. Up until that point I didn't know spearfishing existed. I went into a dive shop to buy fins and saw the pneumatic gun, asked what it's for and how you refill it with gas :) and bought it. After using the Cyrano for a year I became more interested in spearfishing gear and from time to time would stop by different dive shops to see if they had anything for spearfishing. That was the time when you could hardly find any information on the subject. The only book available was Hell Diver's rodeo (a cool scuba spearing book which I still keep). When I first saw a JBL speargun I was impressed! It was a 3 rubber band aluminum tube monster. At that time I thought more power can only mean better spearfishing so I bought it with great expectations. I will never forget my first dive with it, squeezing the trigger and watching that shaft leave the gun in slow motion and arc down and below the fish. I think my eyes must have been bulging and my mouth open with disbelief. Knowing nearly nothing about spearfishing gear I still realized immediately I have a POS on my hands. That was my last dive with that gun. That's how my relationship with JBL started and I could never quite get past that feeling. Whatever new and improved speargun they're producing now, IMO it can't make up for the thousands of shit spearguns they unloaded on the market throughout the years, only changing their design when the market forced them to. I would be embarrassed to sell such a contraption.


    By contrast kudos must be given to Riffe for making the first mass produced high quality reliable wood speargun. Like I said before great guns except for the handle. And while we're on the subject kudos to Don Paul for inventing the open muzzle line routing system still used by Riffe and many other gun manufacturers today.

    When I started diving the Northern Gulf of mexico, you only had 2 choices for spearguns, seahornet or voit (JBL). Everyone that I dove with used the JBL because the 3/8 shaft was less prone to bending on the rig legs. I would over band the gun so much that the barrel would bend. I am sure that this affected the accuracy, but I guess I compensated for it. All of the scuba guys used these guns, and I have seen some huge fish brought in with the magnum and 450 magnum. Later I purchased a Riedel speargun with the undersee mech. you could load that baby up with 4 bands and a 3/8 shaft and have no barrel flex or trigger issues. I used that gun for years, and still own it. I shoot the roballens and other euro guns now, but I killed a lot of fish with the JBL'S "back in the day". Heres a picture from over 25 years ago. notice the heavy bands on the gun and the "trotline" cord on the reel.


    KC

    " IMO it can't make up for the thousands of shit spearguns they unloaded on the market throughout the years, only changing their design when the market forced them to. I would be embarrassed to sell such a contraption."


    X1000


    I still remember when I was a little kid pulling the trigger on a 5# sheephead with my friends 38 special and watching the shaft fall short on what would have been my biggest fish at that time (10 years old). What a disappointment...

    Long Beach Neptune


    USCG 50GT

    Quote from yardsale

    The JBL elite out of the box has shot way better than any of the riffe guns I've shot set up to factory standards.
    I have since bought another of of chris's guns to replace the JBL elite, but I did take whites with it to 55lbs and my little brother now dives with the gun. Next week he should kill plenty of grouper and maybe some yellows with it.
    If you want a wood gun they are unbeatable for the price.


    Josh, they have made some subtle improvement since your version. For example the muzzle is now grooved in the middle so it matches the wood track better. They made a few changes to the mech as well, the current crop loads WAY easier. At least those are the differences I noticed between mine and current ones for sale (at a great price) at J&J.

    Great story Dan, it's amazing how technology changes and how different guns can be. My first gun was the old pre JBL sawed-off mag which was simply Swimmaster Voit I purchased the year I got certified for scuba back in 1973. I still have it at home. I was young, poor and ignorant and not for sure if there was anything better on the market, I never saw anything out there and figured half the problem was me, and too poor to get something else even if I wanted to. I had to change some things on my gun and tweak it and also had to learn to stalk and hunt and shoot better. But I've had pretty good luck over the years. I shoot a JBL Elite Sawed-Off Woody and I'm sure there are better guns out there. I've only just started learning about spearfishing and have a long way to go to be a seasoned spearo, but I'm having fun on the way. Keep those stories coming.
    Bo

    Quote from Dan

    Whatever new and improved speargun they're producing now, IMO it can't make up for the thousands of shit spearguns they unloaded on the market throughout the years, only changing their design when the market forced them to. I would be embarrassed to sell such a contraption.


    I would agree if it was the same owners over the entire history but to my knowledge Guy bought JBL and has been focused on improving quality and has succeeded. With that said, you don't make a perfect 55" wood gun fully rigged for $300. They still have some sloppy craftsmanship but they function and fulfill a market niche.
    To be honest I think a used riffe is a great deal because they hold value, you can buy a just Riffe 3 for $300-350 shoot it for 10 years then sell it for $300. However, off the shelf Riffes are overpriced and I would rather look at custom gun in that price range.

    I've heard statements before about big fish taken with JBL guns. You have to keep these things in perspective. The statements always come from scuba divers. This usually means put the spear point 2 feet away from the head of the fish and shoot. As freedivers very often we require more range from a gun than a scuba diver would, when the fish is further away the gun needs to be more accurate. JBL simply didn't cut it. As far as the new guns, I don't see why they wouldn't have range, accuracy, holding power, and durability. It now boils down to the small details that make a gun a pleasure to use. Why settle for less because of $100.


    hydroid, once you understand spearguns it's cheaper and easier to build a good gun than try to tweak a poor quality one.

    The Swimaster-Voit (now JBL) alloy grip speargun is in a sense the successor to the Jack Prodanovich speargun, just as the Scubapro gun was built on the expertise of Jack Prodanovich's long time friend and fellow "Bottom Scratcher" Wally Potts. Whereas the Scubapro (Scubapro was created by Healthways for a professional product line, but sold off for a dollar when it was still just a name) alloy tube gun is pretty faithful to the Wally Potts speargun, it should be because he developed it, the Swimaster guns went off in a different direction once they decided to go for a two-piece trigger mechanism. Before that these Swimaster guns all used "tuned" single-piece triggers, but once the band load goes up enough then the restoring force as the sear tooth begins to tip over to let the shaft tail go overwhelms the user's trigger pull effort and the gun cannot be fired. Jack Prodanovich used grinding wheels to shape his own trigger mechanism levers (for the degree of precision required), but Swimaster wanted to stamp the mechanism levers out, so their trigger mechanism eventually went off in another direction. Jack made his own "balanced sear" two-piece trigger mechanism, but that was after the Swimaster-Voit gun created by Joe LaMonica. Joe used some of the Prodanovich lever layout, but used it in a different way. For example the long arm that projects forwards from the sear lever in Jack's gun and holds twin "rabbits ear" line releases is a blocking arm for the pivoting side-mounted line release in the Voit, later JBL, gun. The compact mechanism layout with a basically horizontal spring pushing the trigger component from the rear (which the Prodanovich gun originally used) meant that the two pivot pins were going to be close together in the grip, but no one really thought that would be a problem until much later when band materials got better and guns were using more of them. The trigger mechanism gearing had been limited, so the response was to make the mechanism levers out of harder stuff (carbide inserts) as the cast alloy handle could not be easily changed.


    Remember that this was a period when heavy scaled fish are standing their ground and curiously viewing the glass-eyed Cyclops in their midst while being shot at from not that far away from the gun muzzles with 5/16", and preferably 3/8", shafts crashing into their bodies. Sort of an underwater harpooning exercise before the intended victim bulldozed it way into the nearest reef hole, enlarging it in the process and trashed the spears sticking out of it and refused to come out until a few more shots were put into it and it began to weaken. It was only when the "Tahitian" style of home-made "zip gun" shooting slim spears (1/4") and one band powering it all made spearfishers re-evaluate their preference for hurling steel battering rams out of heavy tube guns and timber logs, particularly when attention was being given to faster and slimmer bodied fish. Now you had to shoot straight or miss in the vertical dimension and that precluded heavy shafts unless you have a lot of band power driving the shaft. So those old Swimaster-Voit guns reflected the hunting of the time and if you find the same situations today then they will work as well now as they ever did. They suffered less from recoil as they were often full of water unless you had the floating, sealed barrel option; tube guns did not always float back then as many users were also scuba divers and wanted the gun to stay down with them after the shot, not hang out of reach butt down from the surface.


    Hence when you look at these long-lived old model guns like JBL you see a story of development that covers a changing picture in terms of what is being targeted and where. A lot of formerly abundant, large and overly trusting reef fish were bowled over in the past and some areas have never truly recovered, that is why spearfishing has had to change and that in turn has affected the type of guns which we use today. The eurogun, which has been around from the beginning, was for many years regarded as needing powering up with modified muzzles like the "Hammerhead" and long slot, multi-wrap around band muzzles, but once people realized you could shoot skinny shafts the eurogun was reappraised as maybe not a gun to be over-powered, but one to shoot for its shaft speed and accuracy. That is where we are today, but the sport is more segmented now and many types of guns have different uses for the different hunting situations and what type of fish you expect to be shooting, plus the various rigs required to keep your gun and hopefully, the fish!

    The lineage of the JBL gun in terms of the history of the brand from the beginning is as follows:-

    The "Spearfisherman Company" (founded by Art Brown from memory), "Spearfisherman by Swimaster" when Swimaster took over the "Spearfisherman" gun (cast alloy angular handle model with or without a cocking stock), then "Swimaster-Voit" (which added Joe's gun, the "Magnum" and "Explorer" version with smaller diameter barrel) and finally under Joe LaMonica himself when he continued producing the gun under his own name (hence "JBL") which is now in the hands of Guy Skinner. JBL introduced the first "Woodie" version which was based on their alloy tube gun handle, but molded in black plastic and with the rectangular socket ends for fitting the timber barrel and cocking stock which replaced the circular bosses at each end on the tube gun version.

    Some family resemblances can be seen in the accompanying photo of the Prodanovich alloy handle gun (a "balanced sear" two-piece trigger version), the Spearfisherman "Magnum" by Swimaster (a copy of Jack's gun) and a JBL "Magnum" (formerly Swimaster-Voit) speargun fitted with the "true glide" plastic track on the alloy barrel. Jeff Skinner created the new "Woodie" with one piece, continuous timber stock and the revolutionary "Kitto" designed three piece trigger mechanism with "folded" two arm compound sear lever. So the company has a long history and the "Magnum" alloy tube gun has to be regarded as a design classic being emblematic of all that has gone before and a link to that previous history, that is why I bought one even though it only receives occasional use. If you have an interest in such things then you should own one as cast alloy handle guns have otherwise disappeared, bar the Beuchat (formerly Champion) "Canon" from France which is still around in limited supply.


    The "Carbine" plastic handle gun with single-piece trigger is a similar gun to Jack Prodanovich's fiberglass handle "Hi-Sea" gun and has also been around for a long time. Its trigger is very much like the "Magnum" trigger in terms of the lever shape, but of course not at the top of the trigger as the "Magnum" is a cam lock trigger.


    More info on the earlier "Spearfisherman Company" gun can be found here: http://spearboard.com/showthread.php?t=65207

    The long lived "Swimaster-Voit" and now "JBL" trigger mechanism is shown here. Note the sear lever and trigger pivot pins are set very close together and that spacing limits the length of the sear lever tail. In fact the sear lever looks like it does not have a tail as such, but it still works the same way as for example an "Undersee" mech, but this mech has very different geometry and that unfortunately offers inferior gearing to the "Undersee" type mech.


    The innards of the "Swimaster Spearfisherman Magnum" are also shown for comparison, minus the "rabbit ears" on the forward projecting arm. The "JBL" sear lever does have a forward projecting arm, but in that mech it controls the line release lever on the RHS of the grip.

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