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All About Guns What's your weapon of choice, and why? Discuss the beloved speargun here!

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Old 01-17-2018, 06:15 PM   #16
willstroo
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Re: The Return of the Aluminium Speargun

I don't think roller guns are the answer for everyone, and not everyone is also going for ultimate power. But consider this comparison:

Manny sub roller 110 (as example only, not saying its the best):
-One load movement
-As powerful as 2 band classic gun
-no recoil (none)
-very accurate

Add another band to a conventional 110 pipe gun (3 bands!) and the thing would spray shafts everywhere. Would it have more power? Maybe?

Classic guns are awesome, Abellans for instance, are phenomenal. They have a place in every spearos arsenal.

But if you haven't experienced a well setup simple roller gun, then you should not be commenting. I have tried them all, and there is a place for both.
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Old 02-14-2018, 10:17 AM   #17
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Re: The Return of the Aluminium Speargun

Quote:
Originally Posted by willstroo View Post
I don't think roller guns are the answer for everyone, and not everyone is also going for ultimate power. But consider this comparison:

Manny sub roller 110 (as example only, not saying its the best):
-One load movement
-As powerful as 2 band classic gun
-no recoil (none)
-very accurate

Add another band to a conventional 110 pipe gun (3 bands!) and the thing would spray shafts everywhere. Would it have more power? Maybe?

Classic guns are awesome, Abellans for instance, are phenomenal. They have a place in every spearos arsenal.

But if you haven't experienced a well setup simple roller gun, then you should not be commenting. I have tried them all, and there is a place for both.
Great post Will... I just love spearguns... doesn't really matter most of the time whatever you use... 'horses for courses'... always has been.
However, when given a choice... of which I have too many... I prefer a gun which will dispatch the spear with the absolute minimum of movement and sound. The good 'dialed in' roller gun always has the potential to do that and the self made hunting weapon clearly opens up even more potential.
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Old 02-20-2019, 02:02 AM   #18
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Re: The Return of the Aluminium Speargun

An update is due. I have now managed to work out my next steps to get this aluminium gun made.
First big issue was lightness of the weapon... could it be buoyant. Hollow being key to the design. Did take a few years to work out but I finally found a nice simple free software based solution... couple of clicks. The result being that I can now hollow out my earlier designs which incorporated a standard sized aluminium tube available anywhere in the world. Good to take a few steps back too.


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I covered the 'get it made online' route and the cost is still prohibitive from the 3 most well known companies currently doing 3D printing in aluminium... the average price being well above $500... there's 4 very detailed parts to the gun so quite a bit more than $2000.. I'll wait a bit longer for that simple but very expensive solution.

So... I'm off too Jakarta to visit a few aluminium casting high quality parts manufacturers... made in Indonesia sounds alright to me. Might just do a bit of spearfishing while I'm there too.
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Old 02-20-2019, 08:09 PM   #19
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Re: The Return of the Aluminium Speargun

A number of cast alloy clamshell gun handles were still available in the seventies, eighties and mid-nineties, but gradually disappeared as plastic grips took over. A few guns held on such as the recently retired JBL "Magnum" handle, which I have been urging to bring back to production, however it may be worth looking for the tooling of Healthways and others who made alloy gun parts in volume in the past. Also maybe look into which US foundries manufactured them, although I suspect that you may have already done this.

While I think about guns of the past, Omer for a period made an aluminium alloy gun that was so named, in the last decade. In fact I saved their advert and now attach it here.

Now I look at it again I remember that this is a cassette trigger mechanism gun with a one-piece upper aluminium cast handle grip frame for a socket mounted barrel tube. That socket mounting was first utilized by “Sea Hornet” to enable a more secure mounting than the traditional boss mounted tubular barrels have. A post on the handle frame mounted the side grips or scales or an over handle molded grip as this example has. The trigger mechanism uses the roller tail sear lever used in the earlier Omer "Excalibur" gun.
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Old 02-20-2019, 09:26 PM   #20
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Re: The Return of the Aluminium Speargun

I searched for the OMER "Aluminium" speargun, but all trace of it seems to have disappeared. I had a hunch that it might not last and that is why I saved the OMER advert for it. OMER have a reputation of coming up with new gadgets, maybe selling them before they are ready (customers get BETA guns although they don’t know it, and nor do OMER) and if things subsequently get awkward then quietly drop them.
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Old 02-21-2019, 02:29 AM   #21
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Re: The Return of the Aluminium Speargun

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Originally Posted by popgun pete View Post
A number of cast alloy clamshell gun handles were still available in the seventies, eighties and mid-nineties, but gradually disappeared as plastic grips took over. A few guns held on such as the recently retired JBL "Magnum" handle, which I have been urging to bring back to production, however it may be worth looking for the tooling of Healthways and others who made alloy gun parts in volume in the past. Also maybe look into which US foundries manufactured them, although I suspect that you may have already done this.

While I think about guns of the past, Omer for a period made an aluminium alloy gun that was so named, in the last decade. In fact I saved their advert and now attach it here.
Thanks Pete,

You're knowledge is legendary mate.

As for where to get this actually made/manufactured???... S.E. Asia always looked the most likely...
just been reading about South Korea's very famous design/engineering/production centre in Seoul (Euljiro)... they're going to flatten it very soon. It was my number one destination before I left to wander the world so I'm going to have to get my skates on after looking around Jakarta's equivalent metal casting community. I found it tough to find even a 3D printer business in Southern Thailand... Bangkok or nothing basically... don't like Bangkok much... bit old for staying in cities for long.

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Old 02-21-2019, 04:49 AM   #22
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Re: The Return of the Aluminium Speargun

A lot depends on how many guns you want to make. Permanent metal casting dies were used for guns like the Champion Arbaletes and the Swimaster/Voit/JBL guns as they were churned out in their thousands, but although sufficient for purpose these castings are rather weak as they have tiny porosities in the metal as a consequence of the pressure casting method. Clamshell handle guns can also be cast using match plates to create sand casting molds and these produce very strong handles. An example is the Sampson Gun and of course the Prodanovich gun, so that is a method for production quantities in the hundreds. The downside is they need more machining to create the finished product whereas with pressure die castings you just fettle them and they are ready to go for anodizing, painting, etc.

If you overpower a sand cast handle grip then they are unlikely to break as during cooling the heat moves through the casting taking out a lot of stresses. By comparison pressure die-casting handles are full of stresses, so if you throw one into a hot fire the metal just curls and folds up. This has little bearing on speargun use in the sea, but just shows the inherent differences in the cast metal products.

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Old 02-22-2019, 02:53 PM   #23
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Re: The Return of the Aluminium Speargun

Here is a Sampson gun handle showing how thick the sand casting is. I remember Ron Merker telling me that the castings required around 20 machining operations to produce each handle, they being created in matching pairs as each grip half is marked with a matching unique number on the front of the forward boss.

http://www.spearboard.com/showthread.php?t=140258
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Old 02-22-2019, 03:22 PM   #24
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Re: The Return of the Aluminium Speargun

Another fabrication method is to sand cast the grip handle halves as slabs with only the exterior detail molded and then mill them out internally leaving bosses and lugs to create the hollow clamshell handle halves. The Ultimate spearguns produced by Patrick Frain were created this way and provided flexibility in changing the internal layout if required when say installing a new trigger mechanism variation.
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Old 02-22-2019, 03:25 PM   #25
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Re: The Return of the Aluminium Speargun

You can always spot a pressure die-cast handle by the ejector pin marks that pop the item out of the mold when it opens.

They are the circular marks inside the grip handle which otherwise would seem to have no purpose.
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Old 02-23-2019, 09:41 PM   #26
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Re: The Return of the Aluminium Speargun

Sooner or later we may have a molded carbon fiber grip handle frame, although this in a sense already exists in the Carbon C4 and others that are monocoque guns that use cassette trigger mechanisms. However a carbon fiber clamshell handle grip is a technical possibility. The thing is spearguns need some mass as a gossamer weight speargun would be useless, conservation of momentum requires the projectile to be much lighter than the gun and diver combination.
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Old 02-24-2019, 01:40 PM   #27
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Re: The Return of the Aluminium Speargun

Aimrite had a Carbon Fiber Clamshell Grip. Then Glued. It would seem you could get those smaller Aluminum parts machined fairly easily and less expensively? I know this is a 3D print project, but Aluminum Machines well too?
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Old 02-24-2019, 03:07 PM   #28
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Re: The Return of the Aluminium Speargun

The 3D printer could be used to create a mold for producing the lost wax components that are then used for the sandbox molds, the wax being replaced by metal during the casting process. As wax melts at a low temperature the 3D printed molds to create the wax shapes can be made of a material that lends itself to printing. When parts are cast shrinkage rules need to be used to allow for the dimensional change as parts cool, so the initially computer modeled items need to be slightly oversize.
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Old 03-04-2019, 06:10 PM   #29
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Re: The Return of the Aluminium Speargun

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Aimrite had a Carbon Fiber Clamshell Grip. Then Glued. It would seem you could get those smaller Aluminum parts machined fairly easily and less expensively? I know this is a 3D print project, but Aluminum Machines well too?
This is the grip that you were talking about?

While searching for a producer of carbon fiber handles I found these guys http://www.dodge.com.tw/rw_products_...UaAmxxEALw_wcB

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Old 03-04-2019, 06:45 PM   #30
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Re: The Return of the Aluminium Speargun

Going back to an alloy handle speargun you do not want the barrel to bust the front boss on the grip handle off. I have seen a cast alloy grip busted at the boss when a Tuna was heaved into the boat and landed right on top of the gun that had been thrown in first! The Tuna was a bit too heavy for the gun's lateral loading resistance and snapped clean in two resulting in some unprintable commentary once the disaster was discovered, especially as it was a Prodanovich gun. Now you will realize how big the Tuna was as the Prodanovich handle is super strong! At great expense the gun was restored using inert gas shielded welding by an expert in order to keep the boss true to the gun axis. Unlike permanent diecast alloy the sand cast Prodanovich had a suitable wall thickness to weld, anything else would have been scrap metal. As they are no longer made the gun had to be salvaged at all costs.
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