Posts by Guest

  • DIY PVC knife sheath

    I think that you may be confusing a couple of different plastics. Regular PVC is usually white, while, gray is probably CPVC, which is for slightly higher temperature and pressure. ABS and Polyethelene, two other commonly availabe plastic piping materials, come in other colors. But Dan specifically asked about PVC.

  • DIY PVC knife sheath

    Not sure if pipe is available in black, but flat sheet is available in different colors. Come to think of it, a flat sheet might be easier to manipulate anyway. Any edges should be easily glued or melted together. McMaster.com has a 24" x 24" square sheet that is 0.118" thick (just under 1/8"), in black, for $14.68. Item number 84775K11.


    I was thinking of something along these lines, but I thought that the softened plastic might get mashed into the serrated side of the knife blade, making it difficult or impossible to remove. Maybe it's not quite that malleable?

  • Pressurizing pneumatic

    What kind of pressure are we talking about? A manometer (as different from a pressure gauge) usually reads in inches or millimeters of water or mercury, which implies pretty low pressure. But then, I know nothing of pneumatic guns.

  • More of what we do

    Quote from FREEK

    :eek::eek::eek: H O L Y S H I T! ! ! ! ! ! :eek::eek::eek:


    That's :crazy:and:thumbsup2: at the same time!!!!!! You just floored me!!!! Did the neighbors give you funny looks???:D


    They thought I was building an airplane. :D All it's really missing is a 50-cal. on the bow. Now THAT would keep boats away from my divers!

  • More of what we do

    I tend to have a short attention span, and will throw myself in a different direction every now and then. The copper is fun because most of the pieces are small and don't take too long. Staying focussed for the two years it took to finish the catamaran was brutal, but it is a SWEET dive platform. Here are a couple of old pics taken during construction that I scanned. I'll have to take some newer shots showing all the custom features next time I dive.


  • More of what we do

    I love to see the variety of different things that we all do when we can't dive!


    Me, I build stuff. All kinds of stuff. Everything from colored copper artwork, to the 22' aluminum catamaran that I dive from.


    This is my 1976 Bridgeport milling machine, and my 1962 South Bend Lathe. They are relatively new to me, and still need a little restorative lovin' at the moment. But properly taken care of, they should be turning out good stuff in the hands of my grandkids.



    A bit of the copper stuff:


  • Plastic trigger mech

    I think that we generally equate plastic with "cheap", and poorly made, but that is not NECESSARILY true. The B2 Spirit bomber has almost no metal in it, for example. That's obviously an extreme example, and probably just reinforces that plastics or composites of high quality are usually much more expensive than metal components.

  • Pantoja's accident

    Could a rack be designed to hold them up-side-down? I use slip tips, which are easy becasue we just dislodge the tip and let it dangle.

  • Pantoja's accident

    Wow, thanks for sharing this. I had seen the veiled references to Pantoja getting shot, but didn't know the story. I don't want to derail, so maybe a good topic for another thread is "how do you store your guns on the boat"?

  • Fish movemet

    This may be a slightly different take, but related. Most of the places I dive consist of small, hollow structures like sunken boats or car bodies, generally with many similar structures nearby. Often, I have dived the same spot several times in the space of a few hours, and found the fish to be present, gone, and present again. I have noticed that often, when the fish appear to be gone, they are actually hiding deep within the recesses of the wreck. With a flashlight, you can just see the tip of a tail, or an eye, etc. My theory is that the fish emerge to feed periodically, when the mood suits them, and then retire to a safe place afterwards.


    Within the small confines of Pensacola Bay, I don't think the fish migrate large distances during different tides, or phases of the moon. They just move from shallow sandy areas, for example, to deep muddy holes. They do migrate seasonally, with the best hunting in early spring, just before snapper season opens . . .

  • Looking for least visible float line

    Polypropylene degrades in sunlight. Colored additives help keep the UV rays from penetrating the rope as completely, and slow down the degradation. A clear polypropylene would probably degrade and weaken much more quickly. That said, I don't know why mono can be clear.

  • Tin Man Weights

    Alan - I'm sold out at the moment, but I should have some more ready in about 2 weeks. I can get up to 40 lbs or so in a $9.00 flat rate shipping box, so certainly there is room to combine a couple of orders into one shipment if that works for you.

  • Speargun muzzle velocity

    I actually thought it was unnecessarily complicated. Couldn't you just film the shot from above, isolate two video frames where the spear is in motion, and count the number of pool tiles traversed? If you know the camera captures, say, 16, or 24, or whatever, frames per second, and you know the length of the pool tiles, then calculating velocity is easy.

  • microfibers and graphite

    I tend to agree with Dan, and I can offer two additional thoughts as well. The first is to use Delrin instead of steel plates. Delrin is plenty strong, and is easily worked with wood-working tools. My hunch is that it also would be quieter (if you care) than steel rubbing on steel. And if you are using any non-stainless shafts, the Delrin would be far less likely to wear off the protective shaft plating (as on Rob Allen shafts). Or maybe neither of these is a concern, depending on the gun design.


    Another approach is to use a short section of Delrin dovetailed into the muzzle, and then cut the track straight through the delrin and wood at the same time. This is the full length delrin track that I used, but the concept would could obviously be used for a short section as well, and need not extend above the top surface of the stock.