Posts by bajabound

These pics are of a gun he's building that he's actually excited about.
It's teak with the carbon fiber between the lams and has a shape combining a Merlo and the mass of a Sea Sniper. He's in the process of determining the balance and ballast at which point the laterally split lams will have the ballast installed and then fully glued up. This is so the gun won't need tubes to keep it straight/rigid and the need to fill the tubes with water when you first go in the water.
It's going to be a 60" gun with a 5/16 shaft and three 5/8 bands for WSB and YT and again uses the Neptonics parts.

Here's a couple more.
They use Neptonics parts, the Tuna mech and the UHMW tracks. They're laminated as I described in the vac bagging thread.

Here are couple of my guns under construction.
Sven handles the laminating in his autoclave and does the machining and I sand.
One thing that I like to think is unique to these is that he laminates the materials with carbon fiber unidirectionals between the wood layers. When the layers are together the stock goes into his autoclave that pulls a vacuum at 230F. This yields a crazy stiff and uniform blank. He's got a photo in his shop of him using a 60-something inch wood gun to lever his one ton truck up to change a tire.

One gun is teak and zebra, 63" , the other is purple heart/teak also 63 inches. Their shape is similar to a Merlo and both are set for 5/16 shafts and 3-5/8 bands. So Cal guns that will be for YT and Baja for anything short of Pargo, ideally for Wahoo.

A common misconception of bagging is that it's for removing ALL the air in a laminate.
For the application were taking about here, which I feel is more about even clamping pressure, using a vacuum will spread out the clamping force and allow an exacting tolerance of the glue sqeeze out.
The vacuum needs only to be great enough to obtain the desired clamping force, not a total extraction of the air in the lam, which for all real intents is zero with clean and uniformly flat pieces of wood. Further pulling of a vacuum to where the cellular structure of the wood is being pulled will lead to the foaming and by that time the adhesive has been squeezed out and/or the laminates are bowed under the strain.
If you intend on bagging a porous material, ie, wood, open cell foam or a multiple laminate of 'glass, it's best to seal the lams first using a thinned amount of the adhesive, epoxy in this example. Flood on a batch of catalyzed epoxy thinned 50% with MEK and let it start to kick or let it kick fully in the case of a foam like Klegecell, Airex or the like. Then apply a full coat of catalyzed epoxy and apply enough vacuum to get your intended result. Pulling a vacuum with the sealed lams will keep the porous materials from bleeding and thus reduce the foaming and yielsd the correct properties of the materials and the epoxy.
Hope this helps.

(I think I understand what you're asking. Ideally, and I say ideally, you want to be in line with the gun, that is your gun is an extension of how you have your body lined up. This is especially important if you're using a big log tuna gun, you steer the gun with your body.
A midhandle of 60+ inches will fall into this catagory as well. You extend the gun forward and take your off hand and come up behind the butt as the gun comes up.

Take a look at Don Paul's photo, his off hand is more than likely cupping the gun butt and levering it much like a rudder. When the handle hand raises the gun, the butt hand is in position to provide the fine aiming and the handle arm is locked.

On the other hand, a snap shot you're just going to have to be sure to have gun lined up on the target and not just sighting over the tip while the gun butt is still coming up, and I know all about this one. :rolleyes1:

Thanks all.
I think we met a while back out at Farnsworth, Don. A while back as in the early 80's. I was a Neptune with Bill Graham.
And I've seen you Rich at the FreeDive shop meets. Thats a nice first WSB. I'm going to put up a post for you over in that vac bagging your gun stocks.

Eric here.
Been at it since 1972 and really at it for the last 15.
Live in No Cal and dive between the 48F Sonoma/Mendo coast and the 80+ water of Baja.
Have dove pretty much everywhere, So Pac incl Indo and OZ and NZ, WA to FL. Licensed Unlimited Master, MS in Industrial Tech and a nail banger when things are slow. 180' on air, 820' on gas with stays of 23 days; hey it paid for the kids college tabs... Urchins before the boom, abalone when you could but now it's all about the getting out there with a few friends or myself because I have so few friends and popping a meal. Not a fan of competitions but don't want to put my opinions on others rights; biggest WSB 67#, YFT 180#, pargo 79# and wahoo 57#.
Spend a lot of time in the water with the guy behind speargearshop that's shown me a lot of the nuances and made me a lot better diver technically which means that my enjoyment increased as well.
Build my own guns, boats, houses and breatholds.
Look forward to this place being a LOT less of a exercise in day care than SB.