Posts by popgun pete

If the debate on safeties is ever going to be resolved then you have to look at the particular gun and its layout. Riffe speargun users can take control of the gun from the rear immediately the bands are cocked, so they can ignore the safety. Applying the safety is about making the gun less likely to shoot, but it is not an absolute guarantee of it not shooting. The safety is no excuse for ignoring the safe operation or handling of the cocked gun, that is the user's responsibility. Where the safety improves the odds is say if you pass a cocked gun to someone else, not for an immediate shot by them, but while you need your hands free and you require the gun under directional control by your buddy before you want it back. It is your responsibility to apply the safety before you hand the gun over, but that does not give him carte blanche to point the gun at you or anyone else afterwards.

The "Ocean Rhino" is an interesting gun as the safety lever requires a firm push to apply it and while situated close to your thumb it is not a quick action arrangement, so it does not invite a "will or won't I" switch it "on" or "off" now as you hunt. The idea is you insert the shaft, put the safety to "on" (the safety lever will not go right down to "safe" in the sector recessed into the grip unless the mechanism is fully latched), finish your gun preparations and then push the safety lever up to "fire". After that you can and should ignore the safety until the next reload cycle. If you want to remove the safety from use entirely then you can tighten up the lever screws so that the safety will not budge from the "fire" position as the safety movement friction is via "O" rings on the safety cam support shaft that get more compressed when you tighten these screws. The grip has twin big red safety levers on each side of the gun, so they are hard to miss and you can tell at a glance whether they are "on" or "off" (actually "fire" and "safe"), rather than sighting some obscure little button or slide activator. Being a later arrival on the mass production speargun scene has meant that the design has benefitted from what has gone before. I pulled the gun apart which was the best way to figure out how it worked.

I cannot disagree with most of what others have written here, but as someone who has used a large variety of guns in terms of their propulsion type I can say that the safety is useful for when you are rigging the shooting line on the gun. At that time you don't have control from the rear end of the gun and hence less control over where the gun is pointing at any given moment. As others have said the gun could still shoot, but it is less likely as something usually has to break.

On older rear handle pneumatics wrapping the shooting line could pull on the line release which operated off the toe of the trigger and with a tight wrapping action the gun could shoot while you were doing it. However if you used the safety slide it blocked the trigger and nothing could happen to the trigger when you applied the line wraps. That is about the only time you needed the safety as the safety had no control over the sear lever inside the gun as the trigger pushed the sear lever over, it did not free the sear lever by unblocking the sear lever's action as it does in most band guns.

On an open muzzle gun you complete the line wraps as the shooting line holds the spear on the gun at the muzzle, so the bands are applied afterwards and hence you don't really need a safety, you are always at the back of the gun. On closed muzzle guns you can apply the bands first and then do the shooting line wraps, in which case the safety is a good precaution as you need to change your grip on the gun.

Otherwise you don't need a safety, but ideally a safety immobilizes the trigger and the sear lever such as that used in the Riffe Metaltech which slips in behind the sear box roof and blocks the rear of the locking lever against the rear transverse mechanism housing attachment screw. Note that is the true trigger or locking lever being blocked, not the remote trigger. Safeties that flick "on" and "off" without changing your grip on the gun are not such a good idea, the application should be a deliberate action and you are less likely to have left it "on" when you want it "off" if the safety is not a quick flick on and off switch, but is something that you do as part of gun preparation.

Ultimately you can discipline yourself to use any safety arrangement, but in the heat of the moment it is annoying when you feel the trigger not budge and the moment to use your thumb or trigger finger to poke the safety to "off" is all your intended victim needs to escape. However some guns had very poorly engineered safeties that could be either "on" or "off" regardless of their nominal position and while they possibly secured the trigger that did not necessarily block the sear lever as the mechanism could appear to be latched when it was not, so applying the safety did nothing. A well engineered safety should confirm that the mechanism is indeed latched, otherwise it will not apply and that in itself is a useful feature for a safety to have.

Once when skirting a fringing reef on a small island connected at low tide by a sand spit to shore I went out wide to the sandy edge and a freak wave caught me and started to surf me into shore before I knew what was happening. I put the safety to "on" and then while trying to stop my body surfing action managed to deband the gun, fortunately falling off the back of the rearing wave as I became less hydrodynamic as otherwise I would have been on a dumper with a charged up speargun dropped onto a sandy crescent shore. I was glad I had a safety on that gun, even though it never came down to the test!

At 7 years old that is too young for a speargun. Kids don't understand the consequences of their actions, they think only of the immediate "now" rather than a chain of events in terms "if I do this then what will happen next"? Build him a toy gun that looks the part, not the real thing. If he had an accident then the responsible adult takes the fall, it is not worth the risk for either him or yourself!

Here are some diagrams of the Technisub "Drago". This pneumatic gun dates from 1970 as that is when the patent was lodged in Italy. The muzzle diagram shows the ball (part 315) sear, there are 3 of them at a 120 degree spacing around the muzzle, but we only see one of them in this side elevation. Same concept as the "Sagittario", but a different control system operated by a pull rod (part 17) rather than a long sleeve in/on the front barrel. The various sliding muzzle sections allow the balls to move outwards when the spear shaft pushes into the muzzle and they only drop back when an annular notch in the shaft passes under their position. As the balls fall into the shaft notch a sleeve (part 122) passes over the top of them trapping them in position on the shaft. When you pull the trigger this sleeve is withdrawn, the balls move outwards and the shaft is released and then another smaller diameter sleeve (part 415) moves to trap the balls so that they do not fall out of the gun. Original versions of the "Drago" looked like the diagram, later models had a plastic shroud covering the muzzle to give it a more streamlined appearance.

An ambitious design, but it is much simpler to have different guns for use under certain conditions rather than one gun that does "everything" and involves some compromises. Notches in the front end of the shaft weaken it in a critical area and in the case of the "Sagittario" there were three of them. I expect that a 10 mm diameter shaft used in the "Sagittario" was to maintain some thickness in the shaft where the annular notches were located. Each notch would have had a tapered front section to allow the shaft to push further into the gun and move the spear up a notch as when pushed from the front the balls move outwards, but not when they are pushed from the rear, unless the trigger is pulled.

Tigullio is one of those brands that did not have the profile or distribution, outside of Europe, as say a Mares, Cressi-Sub or Technisub had. Technisub gear was sold by US Divers and that is what made it a familiar brand name worldwide, but when US Divers abandoned spearfishing Technisub guns were no longer a presence outside of Europe. Not much of the Tigullio range ever came here in the past, just the occasional dive product that a few shops had in their "odds and ends" section which stood out as being unfamiliar when you cast your eye over them. The Tigullio RAS pneumatic spearguns were the first pneumatic guns I ever saw from them, although my recollection is the hand grip had a rear offset or crank in it which is now less pronounced, but it may have been down to my viewing angle at the time. They were offered as a cheaper to buy alternative to the Mares "Sten" guns, as were the Seac-Sub guns which were very similar to the original "Sten" model. When I began my speargun research I soon discovered that Tigullio had produced guns in a greater variety than I had ever suspected before and every now and then another one comes up out of nowhere, like this "Sagittario". Before I put this thread up I searched the Web for any info on the gun and found absolutely nothing, even after searching using Google.it, which was surprising! I am sure a lot more pneumatic guns have "fallen through the cracks" which were once distinctive products and not "me too" clones of their competitors' offerings. Lack of spares, the loss of any local distributor and the thought of being stuck with an orphan caused sales to plummet and production eventually ceased once the product's demand in the home country evaporated in favor of more conventional models.

Quote from Dan

I think the pneumatic guns of old are very cool looking compared to plain modern ones which all basically look and function the same. I've never used a vintage pneumatic gun so I don't know how the performance compares to a modern pneumatic. But the fact that without fail all the long time manufacturers changed to the same design has to be indicative that it's better. Look at Tigullio today.

http://desmond.imageshack.us/Himg543/scaled.php?server=543&filename=rasspeargunthumblrg.jpg&res=landing

It makes me wonder why they were messing with those funky designs if today's pneumatic is so simple and probably more effective. The old ones look innovative, but maybe they were just copying each other as they seem to be doing today. I can't say precisely what my point is here. I was just surprised when I saw the name Tigullio because I had one of their current pneumatics a few years back. It was a short gun and performed like any other short pneumatic, not good for anything but a hole gun. But I don't see why the longer Tigullio models wouldn't have similar range to the mares, cressi, and seac pneumatics.

My guess is they were all searching for something technically different, trying to get a marketing edge or some bragging rights at the time. The general idea was that if something was built then it would sell, rather than checking first to see if anyone really wanted it. Hence the explosion of ideas that eventuated in a product offered for sale and a market that would buy it, trusting that it was going to work, otherwise why would it have been made? There was a much larger range of pneumatic spearguns around with a number of major and minor brand names all selling them, their engineering departments were all trying to outdo each other. The more complicated pneumatic guns, with many small internal parts, were probably still a production proposition back then with the low labor costs for assembling and checking these guns in countries such as Italy and Spain, but when the squeeze came on with spearfishing going into a brief decline, especially in the eighties as scuba diving and underwater photography really got going, the mainstream dive equipment manufacturers either dumped or hid their spearfishing lines under a different banner. That is when the wide diversity of pneumatic spearguns suddenly disappeared. The company accountants must have put a blue pencil line through the pneumatic speargun range of many companies thinking that it was uneconomic to continue their manufacture with spearfishing in decline. Band guns were cheaper to produce, so only the simplest to build pneumatic speargun layout survived (and as it turned out the best for how spearfishing has since developed). That and the ability to float after the shot, especially with more spearfishermen being freedivers, is why the "Sten" and its clones became the predominant form of pneumatic speargun (the others were all sinkers), although we now have the detachable rear handle Omer models as Omer sought to capitalize on its "Cayman" handle to entice some band gun users to the pneumatic gun world. At one time I remember serious speculation as to the continued survival of pneumatic spearguns as a type. Only the resurgence of spearfishing has saved the pneumatic speargun, plus the lower costs of Chinese sourced components made for European designs, for now that is. Pneumatic guns are sometimes cheaper to buy than band guns today, whereas once they were around double the cost of a band gun and going upwards from there, that is how much the situation has changed in modern times.

I recently received an older brochure (no date) on Tigullio spearguns and have attached some of the images here for interest. I have never seen the "Sagittario" pneumatic gun, so its inner works are a bit of a mystery beyond what the layout diagram shows here. It appears that it is a forward latching speargun as the balls (part 4) in the muzzle fit into (I assume) annular notches in the shaft of which there are three at varying distances from the front end of the shaft. So you change the power of the shot by inserting the spear further into the gun and locking it at one of these three alternative positions to vary the propulsion stroke of the inner barrel piston in each case. If this is how it works then the problem with such mechanisms is the shaft controlling balls (usually three) are exposed to saltwater and they gradually wear out, so the gun will not latch correctly when the balls no longer slide smoothly in the mechanism slots that control their positions, either held in tightly against the shaft notch (cocked to shoot) or retracted to allow the shaft to escape the gun during the shot. The front barrel appears to have a sprung loaded sleeve that slides back and forth which is released by pulling the trigger and this sleeve in turn controls the position of the balls in the muzzle. It seems a very novel idea, but it works better when the balls, which act as a collective sear tooth grouped in a ring arrangement around the inner barrel, are located down the rear end of the gun where they are inside the compressed air reservoir. That way the steel balls are always enveloped in oil such as they are in the GSD "Punto" pneumatic guns which have three balls inside the rear end of the air reservoir functioning as the piston controlling sear tooth. As the "Sagittario" has them located in the muzzle on the front end of the barrel (which floods when you cock the gun) its barrel sliding piston needs no tail.

Technisub had a "Drago" pneumatic gun that also worked the same way, but the three balls in the "Drago" (and the smaller pistol layout "Pulce" version) muzzle were controlled by a pull rod external to the body or tank tube and located on the bottom of the gun. On the "Drago" model you could slide the moveable plastic grip handle back and forth and lock it up at different positions on the gun body (and also onto the trigger controlled pull rod) so that you had the option of using it as a mid-handle or a rear handle gun. The "Sagittario" gun may be of a similar vintage to the "Drago", but until I saw this brochure I had never heard of it before. I am wondering if anyone here has seen one and knows anything more about them. The "Sagittario" was apparently produced as a TANA 34" (87 cm) and a SAFARI 46" (117 cm) model. No photo or diagram of the spears is shown, so we cannot see the triple notch spacing on the spear shaft.

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.

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.

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.

Quote from hydroid

Not for sure but looking closely at the OP maybe he was not looking to improve range or performance, but going to sharkfin/open muzzle so he could tie his own bands in the "spectra/dynema. Nothing was mentioned about improving, range etc. per se, only looking for options to make his gun more usable. It's only a thought
Bo

Well when and if he responds we may find out, but everyone here is pooling their knowledge and experience and he can take from it what he wants. Those wishbones will work on an ordinary shaft once the sharp edges are smoothed off, that is if there are sharp edges as we do not know how old the gun is.

Quote from LunkerBuster

two very god posts.

i think that as lon as one's expectations are inline with reality and safety stays paramount, them one should mod and tinker away.

just dont think it will make a 36" gun shoot like a 54" one

The "Custom" 4D33 is a 32" gun, so it really is pointless changing it. At that size it can do the job as is, gun mods are more beneficial on a gun that shoots further and can be aimed with more certainty at longer ranges.

Quote from Fungineer

JBL Spearguns

The JBL Custom is a short gun, in fact my "Travel Magnum Combo" has the "Custom" as its short gun alternative without the forward barrel extension fitted. I have never used the gun in the "Custom" configuration, but the shaft length is 24" without the speartip fitted. Such a short spear is not likely to sustain big bending loads, so strength around the wishbone notches is not really going to be an issue, unless the shark fin tabs are your preference for band loading.

Quote from popgun pete

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.

A visit to the JBL spare parts page shows that some changes have been implemented to the trigger and sear lever of the alloy handle guns as can be seen in the following photos. The parts are circled in red to highlight the modifications which are to improve the cam lock action of the trigger mechanism, but I cannot say how effective they are without actually examining a set instead of looking at these enlarged images where photography angles play a part in the detail appearance of the shapes.

Quote from picatoste

Los Clipper con funda son muy bonitos para decorar, para usarlos no son muy buenos sobre todo por la incomodidad de llevar algo tan grande sujeto a la pierna, estos son muy cotizados alli en Estados Unidos, sobre todo en los foros de la guerra de las galaxias
observa lo que hacen con un nemrod Galeon, que sacrilegio.
Cloud City Blaster ***Potential Active Project***

The Clipper with cover are very nice to decorate, to use them are not very good especially because of the inconvenience of carrying something that big subject to the leg, these are listed there in the U.S., especially in forums of the film star wars.
watch what they do with a Nimrod Galeon, that sacrilege.
Cloud City Blaster ***Potential Active Project***

Yes, especially if good guns are converted rather than using already damaged models. Maybe Nemrod could have stayed in business making rayguns! Now I understand where all those old guns have disappeared to in the last decade or so.

Thanks for the photos of the 3rd generation "Clipper". They never came here, although I had seen a few on eBay and noted the sculpted fingergrip handle and trigger finger guard mounted line release. Final "Clipper" guns sold here were holster-mounted "Mini" versions with the orange and silver color scheme, probably "new" old stock. They carried a knife in a second sheath built into the holster. I never saw anyone use one, the holster that is!

The flats on the JBL shaft tail are anti-rotation measures, whereas Riffe places a flat on top instead and squashes down the roof of the sear box. JBL have tabbed shafts for their Elite line, but the old style shaft tail may need those flats filed in. Also the rounded rear end helps reset the sear lever by pushing the sear lever backing projection fully down.

Quote from picatoste

The cyclone, has in the output shaft by a pivot when you get the harpoon deslaza up releasing the wire that is attached to the bottom pivot.
Nimrod fabricate this rifle for the pear and Beuchat, were exactly the same, in recent times Nimrod, before closing the factory in 98 of fabricate with oval aluminum tube,the name is Nemrod sark

El ciclon, tiene en la salida del arpon un pivote que cuando sale el arpon se deslaza hacia arriba soltando el hilo que va sujeto por la parte de abajo del pivote.
Nemrod fabrico este fusil para el y pera beuchat, eran exactamente los mismos, en los ultimos tiempos Nemrod, antes de cerrar la fabrica en el año 98 los fabrico con el tubo de aluminio ovalado se llamaba Nemrod sark.

The function was similar, but "Beuchat" had the sear pin in a round hole in the sear lever with the sear pin moving in a metal cage with curved slots on either side, in fact that system is still used by them today. The sear pin moves up and down in the curved slot allowing the spear tail to push the sear tooth temporarily out of the way so that it can pass over the top of it when reloading the gun. "Marin" (France) had a similar arrangement to that used by "Beuchat", but the curved slots for the sear pin movement were molded into the sides of the plastic "clamshell" molding handle rather than the handle having a metal cage. "Scubapro" used to sell these same "Marin" spearguns with their own name molded into the side-plates. "Rob Allen" and "Sporasub" used the slotted sear lever type, but the spring locations vary and some guns are more reliable than others. The Nemrod gun uses the cage and the slotted sear lever, so it in a sense borrows from both types. I don't remember the "Cyclone" (Ciclon) being sold here, "Nemrod" was a big presence in Australia in the sixties and seventies, their equipment was widely available and I and many other divers owned "Nemrod" diving equipment, then they suddenly disappeared here with no real explanation. The last "Nemrod" guns sold here and in limited numbers were the pneumatic "Mariner", with the "Clipper" pneumatic models continuing on in their orange handle version. "Nemrod" band guns were the "Gaucho" series which used the handle from the "Silver" series pneumatic spearguns, rear handle band gun models from "Nemrod" were not available as far as I know, so finally seeing the "Cyclone" advertisement and gun is very interesting.

Quote from picatoste

Hi, I'd be very grateful if someone could provide me the manual cutting and scanning crucero y fragata Nemrod, also look for catalogs selling diving equipment brand Nimrod scanned data shared greetings to all.

http://img23.imageshack.us/img23/184/81426775.jpg

http://img521.imageshack.us/img521/2263/despciclon.jpg

Interesting trigger mechanism on the "Ciclon" speargun as the sear lever at the rear pivots on the same pin as the trigger. I have never seen inside one of these, although I have seen coaxial pin trigger mechanisms in some of the trigger mechanism patent diagrams, however not everything ends up being manufactured. An ancient Chinese crossbow mechanism used a shared pivot pin for sear lever and trigger, but they were both situated close around the pin and did not extend forwards like the sear tooth does on this speargun mechanism. Do you actually have one of these "Ciclon" guns?

I checked the patent and what I thought was the sear lever is actually the cage for the sear pin, in fact this is a dipping sear tooth design like the Sporasub of similar vintage. The sear lever part 7469 does not have a backing projection, it just has a sear tooth and an elongated angled slot for the sear lever to move up and down on the sear pin as well as rotating around it for the shot. Yoke-type sear levers have a sear tooth and a backing projection immediately behind the sear tooth, examples are Riffe/Undersee and Sea Hornet/Biller.

To complete the story here is the Prodanovich two-piece, "balanced sear" trigger mechanism, hand-made by Jack Prodanovich and his various workshop helpers over the years until he handed over to Mark Dubbs who was one of the previous assistants. Sadly, the Prodanovich guns are no longer being manufactured.