Posts by popgun pete

  • JBL spearguns

    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.

  • Guns of the legends Collection

    Quote from Dan

    Very cool the cutout Scubapro. What is the effective range of such guns?


    Quoted shooting distances from manufacturers are often misleading because they are usually talking about different measures. For example in Soviet-era speargun specifications there is the "flying range of the harpoon" and the somewhat shorter "range striking target", or kill distance for a given chamber pressure in the gun. No doubt if any gun failed to meet its specs, or the manufacturer was guilty of handing out misleading numbers, those concerned would be hauled up before Soviet officialdom to explain themselves (State ran companies made all consumer goods). An example is the Russian "Prizm" 70 cm model (which was sold in the USA for a time by "Klondike Imports") has a handbook specified "Maximum range flying harpoon in water under pressure of air in chamber of gun P = 147x10^4 N/m2 (15 kg/cm^2)" of 10 meters! Whereas the "Maximum range striking target under pressure of air in chamber of gun P = 147x10^4 N/m2 (15 kg/cm^2)" was given as 5 meters, so a very big difference! Maximum internal gun pressure allowed was 20 kg/cm^2. In reality there should probably be three figures specified, maximum flying range of the spear until it drops to the bottom, the range at which it will actually kill something and the near linear trajectory range where the spear hits without allowing for any drop in the aiming point, assuming that the gun is accurate in the first place.

  • JBL spearguns

    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

  • JBL spearguns

    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!

  • JBL spearguns

    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.

  • Guns of the legends Collection

    Front mounted snorkel is to minimize drag, but as we know that is not a big consideration these days. Mares used to make a front mounted snorkel for fin racing, it had a head band attachment to hold it in place. Saw one a few years ago, they may still be made today, this one was at a disposal store outlet, brand new in its packaging.

  • Guns of the legends Collection

    Here is the patent drawing for the "Hurricane" dry spring gun showing the trigger seal (the corrugated rubber gaiter shown in the diagram was replaced by a packing type seal in production) and the spring loaded water draining valve in the grip handle butt. That allowed water to be tipped out of the gun as otherwise water will not come out rapidly if air cannot get in to replace it, such as when tipping water from an inverted full bottle which tends to come out in "glugs". With an air bubble trapped inside the "Hurricane" there was some offsetting buoyancy to the gun's apparent weight in the water, in fact that was the main reason for the design which is otherwise bulky for a spring gun. The propulsion spring rubbing on the interior wall of the barrel tube robs compression spring guns of power, so operating the spring in air was not such a big improvement for either it or the "Waterless". Once air-tight sealing of a speargun was complete it was much easier to eliminate the spring and use compressed air instead for the energy storage medium. The "Hurricane" dry spring gun could never have been a pneumatic speargun as the sear tooth is located in front of the piston with the gun cocked to shoot, it is in that position in the "Hurricane" as the sear tooth also holds the spear in the gun by holding the spear tail against the front of the piston. In a pneumatic speargun the sear tooth must be behind the piston where it is inside the compressed air chamber. If the sear tooth is outside the compressed air chamber then it has to be at the muzzle making the gun a forward latching type as the Technisub "Drago" was. Forward latching guns use annular notched spears at the front end of the shaft which inherently weakens the spear.

  • Guns of the legends Collection

    The Pulvenis speargun was the spring power "Waterless". It was a forward latching gun with a sealed barrel tube holding the metal coil spring and with no grip handle as such, it being held like a handspear or a lance to fire at fish. Called the "Waterless" as an air bubble was retained in the barrel tube so that the coil spring compressed (during loading) and expanded (during the shot) while still operating in air. Some water pushed up into the open mouthed barrel at depth due to increased ambient pressure, the "dry spring" aspect working like an open bottomed diving bell. The gun either had to be cocked on shore, as seen in the photos, or the water tipped out or drained out by lifting the gun clear of the water if it was cocked in the water. A rear screw cap could be temporarily opened up to help drain the water out of the barrel tube by eliminating any suction, but had to be closed before lowering the gun back into the water. Ron Mullins bought one of these "Waterless" guns and it should be on his "skin-diving history" web-site, but may have no details beyond the photo.


    The French "Hurricane" spring guns are another form of "air bubble" dry spring gun which are more "speargun-like" in appearance, but similar to the "Waterless" need the muzzle to be always kept pointed downwards to stop water entering the barrel and the captive air bubbling out during the dive. There are photos of "Hurricane" spring guns earlier in this thread, the spearguns were developed by Pierre Martineau in the forties.

  • Guns of the legends Collection

    For those wondering about the ferrule on the section of thread behind the handgrip catch on the "Cernia Velox" it is a joining system for the front and rear sections of barrel. You unscrew it to pull the rear section of barrel free from the grip section and then fold the gun on the coil spring acting as a sort of hinge. This halves the length of the spring gun for transport. Note that the spear is slightly longer than half the length of the gun. Some models the ferrule connection is in front of the grip and in others it is behind it. When you have a six foot long gun to transport the folding system is very handy.

  • Spring Gun Maintenance" The world of grease, oily rags and patience

    The propulsion spring in a "Saetta" compression spring type gun is much longer than the barrel and has to be compressed before the rear retention pin can be inserted (there is a sort of steel piston at the front end of the spring and a muzzle restriction to keep it inside the gun). This is a pretty difficult job unless you have a tool to hold the spring down while you push the pin in, which is actually a brass bolt with a nut on the other side, and similarly to get the pin out when you want to remove the spring for cleaning. The smallest diameter on the tool (made of wood) fits inside the rear of the spring, the next diameter fits neatly into the barrel tube and the diametrical step butts up on the rear of the barrel tube with the notch in the front end making space for the brass pin or bolt. I made this one up out of an old broom handle and a piece of stainless steel spear shaft that had seen better times. You use the tool in an analogue fashion to the charging pin (hand loader), except you are working on the rear end of the spring and not at the front end of the spring as when cocking the gun. The spring (or springs; some guns use two, one left-hand coiled the other right-hand coiled with one inside the other) are quite strong and if you lose your grip then the spring will fly out with a noisy "klong" and administer grease to whatever it runs into, like your head if you don't duck out of the way in time!

  • Vintage speargun photos


    Is there a name anywhere on this gun? We know who invented it, but does it have a name as such? Most spearguns have an identifying tag or model number, or a serial number.


    This is the gun's trigger mechanism. Note that it is somewhat like a rearranged "Sea Hornet" mech if you turn the levers around through 90 degrees and rearrange some of the features, the "Sea Hornet" mech being invented totally independently some decades later. Both are "cam lock" trigger mechanisms. The relatching action is different, spring 30 biasing the sear lever in the opposite direction to that in the "Sea Hornet" which moves downwards after the shot.

  • Vintage speargun photos

    The "Airmatic", like many early pneumatic spearguns, was not completely airtight, so such guns often contained a "built-in" hand pump to enable the gun's pressure to be topped up from time to time. The fitting of modern seals can cure many of these problems, but when the guns were produced tight press or interference fits of tubes into body castings or screw threaded connections with washers placed at strategic positions kept the air pressure in the gun at the necessary construction joints in the gun body. Attached is the John Salles patent for his "Airmatic". Like the French "Sallematic" the spear only inserts as far as the handgrip where the sear for the piston is located. The trigger is of the "outrigger" type and pivots out one side of the grip. This makes for easier sealing of the trigger where it penetrates the gun's pressurized area and was relatively easy to make, but improved ideas were to follow in the next generation of pneumatic spearguns.

  • Vintage speargun photos

    Quote from LunkerBuster

    the rifle stock is exceptional..is that a racheting power mech?


    the last one looks in full working order, is it functional?


    very cool collection Dan


    The side slotted barrel speargun with "cremaillere" rack lever loading was patented by Paul Bellan in France in 1941 when he lodged his application on 3rd May of that year. The toothed rack underneath the stock is cranked by the lever which pushes the band anchor position mounted on the front end of the rack forwards to stretch the bands out to the "cocked to shoot" position. The French patent was published on 14th October 1943, having been granted on 5th July in that same year. Another version was proposed with rollers at the muzzle and a "chariot" moving in the reverse direction to cock the bands (or coil springs [ressorts] as that was an alternative to rubber bands which were then made of rather poor stuff). Divers soon discovered that you did not need a rack and lever system to load a band powered speargun. Once the "Arbalete" appeared in 1943 the days of the cumbersome rifle based spearguns were finished.


    The "Airmatic" is a US version of the "Sallematic" French pneumatic guns. John Salles made the US guns, Rene Salles was his brother who patented his version in France in 1946. The US Patent Office sat on brother John's pneumatic speargun patent until 1960!

  • Guns of the legends Collection

    Thanks Don, that is exactly what I needed to see. The two-stage loading involved dragging the grip back after initially inserting the spear into the muzzle and partially loading the gun. So the operator had normal muzzle loading followed by using their feet on the foot pegs to haul the propulsion spring back to full compression. Now we can see the slot in the barrel tube where the sear tooth travels back and the catch to secure the grip in position.

  • Guns of the legends Collection

    I thought that some images of the Undersee "Reefmaster" should go here. After the "Bazooka" the "Reefmaster" was Undersee Products' most iconic gun, it was the big gun of the Undersee range and bowled over many large Groupers and Cods in the old days. A large piece of timber was needed to craft each "Reefmaster" speargun, the only separate piece of wood used in its construction was inset into the chin of the muzzle, you can just see the timber join which is opening up on this forty year old plus example. This gun no doubt inspired Jay Riffe to build his own spearguns after his visit to "downunder", a careful inspection of the "Reefmaster" will reveal the similarities, including the vertical saw cut in the front of the muzzle to wind the shooting line. An even larger piece of wood was required for the darker colored gun (not an Undersee factory gun) as that chin mount for the 12 gauge powerhead is the same piece of wood as the stock, only the wooden muzzle guide on top is a separate piece of timber. These guns were built in the days when quality seasoned, straight grain timber was in plentiful supply and much of the stuff that we use today would have been burnt along with the off-cuts and scrap. The Undersee mortise mechanism on both guns (the powerhead equipped gun has been completely restored) has stood the test of time and seen service in thousands of guns, having been designed by Denny Wells and placed into volume production by Don Linklater who founded and owned "Undersee Novelties", later renamed as "Undersee Products". Those two names certainly merit "Legends" status as we live with their legacy today which is embodied in the modern arsenal of "Underwater Arms".