I found this thread on a search, hence a bit late in commenting. I have two of the RPS-3 spearguns (PПC-3 in Russian) which use the rubber sleeve on multi-ported barrel system to separate injected water, during muzzle loading, from the compressed air reservoir. One is brand new, never been in the water, but the other is in very poor shape. I was wondering how your gun has survived use in salt water. Many of the smaller mechanism parts are only plated steel (looks like cadmium plate on the unused one, some silvery-grey stuff on the other, older, example) which seems to have suffered badly from immersion in seawater. In fact the gun is essentially ruined, so I completely disassembled it including the rear mechanism parts that are never meant to be removed, having been staked in place. Back home in the Ukraine and Russia diving is conducted in freshwater lakes and rivers, thus internal speargun corrosion is not such a worry in the short term. The design of the RPS-3 trigger mechanism is unique in that the size limitations imposed by mechanically releasing a spear tail which has to pass through an all important muzzle seal left little material to work with. For example the sear "tooth" (actually a tiny angled step inside a metal disc) moves only 1.5 mm to release, that being all that the sear tooth hangs onto on the mushroom headed shaft tail. It is so marginal that I wonder that anyone contemplated making a speargun this way, because that release system required very tight machining tolerances to make it work. The designers seem to have been driven by the desire to make something that was completely different from how other guns worked and they certainly achieved that, but at what manufacturing cost? I could never see a speargun like this being made in the West as you would go broke making it with all the precision machined parts, yet the rubber seals must be the worst that I have ever seen in a speargun, being rubber packing's rather than "O" rings, and very poor ones at that.
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