Quite awhile back my teak supplier told me he had a handrail from a yacht, and that it would make a great speargun. Since the deal sounded "too good to be true" I ended up the proud owner of a yacht...handrail. He was right about the wood. It was really a beautiful piece, and it was when I looked at the shape of the handrail that I decided I would need to break some of the conventional rules of building spearguns. So I decided I would start with what would be almost the final shape, and go from there. Good thing I got a deal on the wood. The piece looked like an inverted "U", and the legs were kind of beat up, so I planed them off and ended up with a piece like this.
Then, I cut a piece out of the middle to give me the 2 halves I wanted. I ripped 2 lams from the piece I cut out and glued them to the bottom, giving me my blank, which now looked like this.
I installed one of my delrin enclosed tracks without any problem since I'm using a milling machine and the bottom and sides of the blank are flat. This would have been a real challenge with a router. I decided to use a Tin Man handle and trigger/ pushrod, and that went in the same way you would install it with a conventional gun. But, since I was going to be using brushed aluminum for some other stuff on the gun, I didn't want the black handle frame. Tin man to the rescue- turns out he had a couple of prototypes from when he was developing the handle, so they were bare aluminum- just what I wanted. More in the next post.