Frankengun

[rigdvr]

I wasnt coming down on you IYA...I am a big fan of your posts. It always seems you consider all sides before you reply...good stuff all around. You just make me laugh sometimes, thats all! Definately noone should get their feelings hurt on here.:hungover

 

[Iyadiver]

Hello Rig,
I took so long to make this post , I just realized u came in, you were not here 30 minutes ago...he he he. Don't worry Rig, I don't think u r coming down on me...honest... I take jokes well, cause I like making one too. Ha ha ha.

My that particular post might sound rather "elderly" because I don't want SA/Riaan to feel discouraged to proceed with his Frankengun thread. His excitement is so high on the project ( I would too if there is such an access to a complete workshop ) we must respect this special moment of joy he is looking forward to. I really would like to see SA Frankegun thread to go along with whatever SA/Riaan has in his mind. SA/Riaan post to expect ideas/input, so ideas is what we will give him and encouragement too. He gave so much help on info to others so it is polite to return this courtesy to him.

Well I'm sorry to everyone if the post somehow made me look like a sensitive fool, I am just defending what I think its right...... politely.




Hello Murat,

Everytime I think how if anyone can actually build a recoiless super accurate speargun, I thrills me. I am waiting for a modern day Jay Riffe, Steve Alexander, Jack Prodo & Larry H to pop out and come up with something spectacular, I mean a big jump.

It is just a matter of time when someone with extremely good engineering skill and extra brain cells to get interested in spearfishing and go all the way like the gentlemen I mentioned. If I am not wrong, we owe Uncle Jack Prodo for the rubber we use today. We owe to Steve & Herry for extensive ballistic testing, enclosed track & refined trigger. We also owe all spearos who demand so much out of a gun and thus manufacturers have to improve the design bit by bit.

We had carbon dioxide powered speargun, mechanical spring piston, 22 caliber firearm cartridge powered, air spring of pneumatic and the by far most popular : band/rubber powered spearguns.

I like high power spearguns because of the extra engineering involved, we see designers pushing the limit of their skill and know how.

Jay Riffe and Steve were good machinist by profession ( if I recall correctly ) , this is exactly the skill needed to build good spearguns and they are also perfectionist and the best of all ........ they are hunters themselves.

We see a lot of material technology entering into speargun production, Titanium, Kevlar and carbonfiber. Some are from aerospace/aviation and some from military origin.

I am waiting for the big jump in speargun technology. I am told the power level we are at now is good enough to hunt the biggest pelagic, but to me .........the mobility, handling comfort and actual technological breakthru of the speargun has not really improved much in the past many many years. On the business end : speargun is a very small market worlwide, I don't suppose anyone can afford to waste money on R&D if it weren't for personal satisfaction.

It is in this kind of forum ( thanks to internet ) that we worldwide spearos can get together to talk of our nonsense today which who knows one day might be a practical solution to something. Also here is the place we get input.......... " Hey, someone tried that, it didn't work !!! " Imagine without internet forums, how could you and I get so much advice from the pro around here in just a matter of weeks. We can ask actual users of what they feel & learn of a particular product. We can tap expertise from those willing to share. Of course people are different individually world wide, some think talking/writing in forum is a waste of time, why not go hunting instead........... shoot some fish and show the world what u are capable of and bla bla bla. Don't we all wish we can go hunting every so often with any gun on no budget restriction ?

I like comparing my airgun hobby to speargun because it is a much more matured & researched technological status where it is now. They already had compressed 0.50 caliber airguns during the Napoleon war and they were the dealiest sniper feared in those days......unbelieveable. Today the British and the Germans because of strict fire arm laws turn their focus on airguns for small game hunting and plinking, under this circumstances they spin their heads to produce amazing break thru. I seen it evolved so much in the past 20 years. Since they don't burn powder for projectile propulsion, they share many design problem common to speargun.....this is what I like about them. They too had recoil problem spoiling accuracy, so they built recoiless units. Some discard the spring and go for single pump pneumatic, the brilliant Germans built mechanical recoils absorbers, like a floating on rail power unit. One brilliant British guy built twin opposing spring to cancel each other recoil. They used to add weight for ballasting but since a very heavy gun for land use is not tolerable, they needed ingenuity to overcome the recoil problem.

The last trend and most succesful one was the 3000 psi suba tank charged units. CO2 is not reliable with different ambient temperature and the inherent lower pressure limited its application. If you see the 10 meter Olympic airguns events, you will wonder how much research has gone into those kind of accuracy. America is the last place for these precision airguns ( now it is growing ) cause owning fire arm is so easy in most states. US made Benjamin, Crossman, Sheridan, Daisy are not airguns......they are pure garbage. But the irony is that : there is one person in America that makes one of the most gorgeous, accurate and highest power airguns in the world all the way to 0.50 caliber. You only need to pay US$4,000 and wait like a year to get one of his. This is what I like about America ... tons of material resources and the freedom to be creative.

We spearo on the other hand counter the classic recoil problem with weight......weight.........and weight and took it for granted that mass & buoyancy of the bulky gun can be sorted out easily since we do not carry the gun weight in water and the result is a speargun that look more like telephone poles than a speargun. We keep telling ourself, hell, this is what it should look like !!!!

As a bonus for you Murat , I enclosed photo of a similiar British made ultra accurate riffle ( I don't have photo of mine ) that my brother use to take the delicous Gobbies fish. The top small tube naturally is the barrel, the lower bigger tube is the air reservoir/tank. All you need is a scuba tank ( I have lots ) , a special quick fill filling hose for the airgun. 10 seconds is all you need to fill up the gun from a 3000 psi scuba tank. From Norway you can actually buy a special 3000 psi hand pump if scuba tank not easily available. The silencer works like a dream, you can only hear the sound of the small piston hitting the air release valve. Under 1,200 feet persecond the pellet does not produce any "sonic' boom, so all very quiet shooting. Mine has the Bausch and Lomb Balvar 2.5-10x 40mm variable aparture scope.....very nice stuff and cost less than a Zeiss. U can order something rigged exactly like mine for US$ 2,000 (at the most) FOB United Kingdom, including a mini 30CF scuba tank.

If you want more info I can email you nice photos. I don't want to further crowd non- speafishing related photo in this beautiful forum.

 

[Murat]

Dear Iya thanks for the photo.

I have great knowledge about firearms especially shotguns,airguns.snipers,and some extreme riffles such as Browning 50 cal. or AWM.

I think your airgun is pretty cool but didn`t you think you over paid it.

For 3 to 4 hundred dollars you can get one of the most powerfull airguns RWS or DIANA or may be you can spent few hundred more and you can get Beeman Crowmagnum (sorry if i spelled wrong).

What do you think about these 9mm airguns as i read some dudes use them for deer hunting woooaa.

In my country there is no permission for firearms such as sniper

For recoilless speargun i have a idea but not sure if its works or not here it is:
If you know there is one model of airgun Diana or RWS model 54 at the end of the barrel there is some recoil absorbsion mechanism that springs back the barrel during shoot so when you shoot force doesn`t flow through your arms and kick the gun up.Instead of this barrel moves back and it tranmits its energy to the spring may be or recoil absorbsion mechanism.
In speargun to do this they must produce the barrel with two part one is moving and another one is fixed altough they must put some mechanical parts in the speargun.This sounds quite difficult for the teak guns and power band guns may be it can be aply old spring non teak spearguns.(this is just my though since i am not expert on mechanical engineering i may be wrong but one day if they decide to use some electrical parts on the spearguns may be around 2500 AC with water proof materials i will be help you. I assumed we are all immortals to see 2500 AC hehehehe

 

[Murat]

Perhaps there is one more way to build Frankengun.

For extreme range (may be more than 100 meter) and superb velocity you must use bolt technique that are using very powerfull riffles and snipers.

If you make some expolusion to shoot the shaft certainly it will give the shaft more than 100 meter effective range and great impact power in order to control recoil and that huge energy beacuse of the expolusion you must use Bolt Locks as i mentioned before. It sounds like easy but you guys must be genius to achive that.

 

[Griff]

100m!

Murat, can i ask what you want to shoot thats 100m away? i wish it were possible to even see 100m underwater


iya
For the ideas of using sliding barrels etc to counter recoil, that'l reduce the recoil that your hands and arms have to absorb, but what for? well, maybe i would feel differently if i was firing a 5 band lamp-post, but i think that your elbow does a better job of absorbing recoil than is worth the extra mechanics of sliders etc.

for me, and probably for you too, i think that the problem with recoil is the energy that is lost, and the inaccuracy that it creates.
when a speargun is fired, the spear and the rubbers moving forward cause the gun to move backward. ok nothing new, anyone who has fired the gun close to their face knows very well :blackeye . the problem is that the gun moving backwards is expending energy that could be put into the spear.
i think that there is a way to counter this and this is where i do support the recoilless idea. if you have a weight, (sorry iya, but i can only think of this working with a weight) that is also loaded by some means (spring rubber or air) so that it shoots in the opposite direction (as in towards the handle). when this is "shot" it will cause the gun to move forwards. agree? so when you fire both simulaneously, and if they are balanced properly, their momentums should cancel each other out. the problem comes in building it. if the weight were inside the barrel (a convinent option) then the combination of the two forces will make the speargun dip. maybe this can be fixed by having the rubbers below the spear, like riffe guns, so that the rubbers pulling the muzzle up counter the rotation.
end of the day i dont know if its all worth it, but its fun to think this stuff up.

 

[icarus pacific]

Re: 100m!

Originally posted by Griff
end of the day i dont know if its all worth it

you got that right.

sven

 

[narked]

And surely a gun with 100m+ range is pretty dangerous, especially in low-vis situations. All you need to do is miss the target and god knows what you might hit, there could be a diver only 10m infront of you that you werent aware of for example.

Going back to the idea of electrical parts, Heckler and Koch make an underwater pistol for military divers, which is electrically powered. The downsides being it has to be completely sealed, and after you've fired all 5 shots the gun has to be sent back to the factory to be reloaded.

 

[Iyadiver]

Well a 100M is a good imagination but surely too dangerous, unless it has an on board computer that steers itself to the fish or we teether that to a mini cable like a submarine torpedo. So the spearo need to have a 3" LCD TV screen and a joy stick to drive it. Ha ha ha, just kidding. However, Tom Clancy will approve.



Griff,

True, a gun moving backwards waste energy. Dilema yes ?
Thrust against trust in opposite direction, good foundation.
One British airgun guy used this method to cancel recoil but since he is harnessing air pressure at both opposing pistons, he get recoiless action and improved power. Lucky guy.

I mean we will still use weight, no doubt but if possible not only weight......something else.

To me recoil starts to get offensive at 4 x 16mm shooting a 3/8" shaft with a single hand hold on a light gun. I am describing my Standard #4 Riffe. 4 band ....2 hand OK. 3 x 16mm, single hand very sweet. SA desire is to realy load the Frankegun, way above anything I ever handled, I can only imagine the overall weight might be in the 10kg region..to absorb recoil ......this is heavy and must be damn thick teak stock. All the weight dampening must be compensated with enough volume to float the gun without shaft. Totaly re-coiless I think still some light years away for a band gun but making it semi-recoiless and allow the gun to be lighter and thus slimmer for better swinging....might be possible. Difficult to engineer but as what the American President mentioned ( I forgot who ) about putting man on the moon :

"It is not easy but because it is difficult, so we must try it" ( well he said it in much better word & English ... I watched that in Discovery )

Anyway workable recoil absorber/reduction mechanism exist, it is just difficult to apply in such destructive enviroment of the sea water, not impossible but on the business point of view..... expensive !! But for one of a kind dream gun, if I have the budget and someone has the brain.........I personaly will do it because the fun is in the learning and what we can achieve, not merely for the power and shooting range. It is like a piece of personal art, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

If you experience the Diana/RWS 54 airgun Murat mentioned, you will think what a piece of brilliant engineering their recoiless mechanism is. This is not new, Feinwerkbau of Germany had a similiar mechanism for their low power 10 meter Olympic airguns and they were the Olympic champion guns for so long untill single pump and scuba pneumatic came to the market. I never ripped open the two recoiless guns. The beauty of these 2 guns is that after each shot, you hear for a while some mechanical sound, the mechanism countering/removing the recoil. How ? I need US$400 to buy the Diana 54 ( if available in Jakarta, make that at least US$800 ) to rip it open and see how it does it.

But the Diana/RWS, also of Germany is the first manufacturer to be able to make it for higher power application, the time span was about more than 15 years between those two German designs. A few years back Air Arms of UK also made one but only to the stage of semi-recoiless, why half-done... I don't know, probably the Diana patent still valid.

This high power spring pistons I mentioned is low recoil compared to a 4 x 16mm speargun, they are only like 16mm x 2 but when shooters demand accuracy with high power to do 12 mm C-T-C at 30 meters even the slightest recoil is destructive. I mean the the beauty here is on the SOLUTION, this is what I am trying to emphasize and since I handled those guns............ I am very impressed for their R&D. Their solution doesn't appear without research.

This 54 without the recoiless mechanism ( they call it Diana 52 ) break the cross hair on even extremely robust telescopes, push regular scope mounts away from the rail even after using loc-tite, I mean they are just recoil makers. Their recoil is actualy a double recoil, the moment the piston push end at the compression chamber and when the piston rebounce ( this is well documented for spring piston ) . In a way quite similiar to a speargun, first recoil when the shaft launched out and second recoil when the all the rubbers hit home, all in micro seconds. I believe no one has documented this double recoil in a speargun but I honestly think that is what "could be possibly" happening on a band speargun. Speargun has so few "Einstein" working on them, I mean the engineers, not manufacturers. All the great legends have done their parts on how a speargun should be but we need more engineers to elevate it the a more state of the art shooting gear.

Simple test, take a catapult/sling shot, shoot empty, the Y stick will be propelled forward for a bit and a while. More diificult test is to make a dummy shaft with a special modified trigger that allows only the rubbers to be launched but no shaft along with it. Shoot the gun, I am sure the 4 x 16mm rubbers alone hitting the muzzle will cause quite a recoil. If we can study this well maybe we can avoid muzzle flip in a more elegant way than putting on mini wings/band elevator.

Don't we all wish a speargun so light, fast like a any 110cm Euro gun with 16mm x 2 , very mild recoil but deliver the punch and range like a Riffe Blue Water ( no wings please ). It is not entirely about the fish but when you ever handle a brute gun and somehow somebody can make a recoiless or semi-recoiless unit out of it................ you will fall in love for what it can do, not for what it can shoot. Don't we all love advance engineering that works ? Ha ha ha, I mean one that doesn't break when u r spearing.

I am not an engineer to this kind of level and I personaly do not know how to make one of this dream but I am sure it eventualy will head into that direction..when.... I don't know. We have achieved very respectable power level in a speargun, next step will be improving accuracy significantly and making it compact and so on.......... therefore one of the most obvious solution will be a more intelligent solution to get rid of recoil.

The more we urged people to design it, I guess the faster one will appear on the custom market. Is a business thing...demand...supply if feasible.

The only problem is that no one is asking it , everyone simply follow the rule that weight ballast is the only solution because it is the easiest solution.

Henry Ford built the first mass produced cars, all were black color those days black..why......... hell I don't know, I wasn't even born yet. They thought other color was not the norm, guess what happened then ?

Sorry Griff, my capacity is only demanding for it but not to the stage of how to build it. BTW, I just had a long though about the reverse (rear ) rubber position to supposedly counter recoil. I think the Riffe Metal Tech will be a good platform for the modification. It has the strength to be drilled anyhow, anywhere for the modification. I don't have the patience to build from zero. If the enclosed track is released, I will start then...for fun.

Thanks Griff and Murat for ur patience and time.

Hmmm speargun...speargun... very addictive.

Cheers
IYA

 

[Abriapnea]

Originally posted by Iyadiver






The only problem is that no one is asking (for) it
IYA [/B]

Well , I certainly aint !rofl rofl
Sorry , Iya , on a purely theoretical level this is facinating but if you ever develop this monster I would prefer to keep at least one island between us
BTW if I decide to hop over to Indonesia next year would you take me to some of your hunting spots ?
Spearing spots Iya , NOT nightclubs .:naughty

 

[Iyadiver]

Abri,

Come over if ur vacation allows.....we go hunting, u teach me apnea....then we go clubbing .

I hope the west moonsoon will not be terrible this year, when is the tourist off limits months, I mean bad weather in Thailand ?

Cheers
IYA

 

[Abriapnea]

Iya ,
We normally close the shop for the whole November , don't think my finances will allow me to travel though . My plan is to look for a job around May somewhere .
There is a diveshop in Phuket that stocks spearing gear apparently , so if I do come over I'll let you know , might be able to bring something you need .

 

[Griff]

Originally posted by Iyadiver
So the spearo need to have a 3" LCD TV screen and a joy stick to drive it.

not spearo, computer gamer. maybe playstation will buy the rights

hey iya, who knows. maybe there's something out there that will supercede the whole speargun idea. like spearguns supereceeded the sling. spearos will be saying stuff like
"no, the tuna were all like under 500 lbs, i would have felt bad using the x-gun, so i mucked around with my ol riffe bluewater instead."

btw, does anybody know why powerheads have been outlawed in most places? is it because killing huge fish was just too easy?

Mark

 

[Iyadiver]

Hi Abri,

OK.........when ever U R ready let me know. Good idea on the spearguns parts, thanks. I hope the Thai bath pick up much higher.......... my currency is still the worst hit of all. So we Indonesian end up still the poorest in Asia.....perhaps top low 5 of the world too. Mhhhmmm , where did my presidents kept all the embezzled money ?


Griff,
Powerheads is not allowed in most countries as far as I know is because the bullets they use belongs to the fire arm. So whenever a gun is illegal, owning bullets goes with it. Even though the best bullet is the blank ones for Power Head because the killing is the gas expansion not the projectile, anything with fire arm powder is bad news in most country. Check AB Miller site, they have power head and they tell you that it is design at such ( some dimensional thing ) that otherwise it is considered fire arm even for the generous US law. Honestly that thing can take a real bullet and and kill people, so most goverment don't want robbers using a decent looking stick blowing people away

If u need a power head, try one from Australia that use CO2 cartridge instead of bullets. Same design as powerhead but when you slam it into a bad predator, a mini nedlee punch a hole in the CO2 canister ( this is not the small airgun CO2 canister, it is one size up ), at 1800 psi this CO2 will blow the bad predator like a ballon. Introducing such pressurize air into the blood stream will surely kill a bad predator. No explosion sound like a bullet, safer and I supposed legal in most country cause we can call it "CO2 powered Big Ballon Blower", ha ha ha ha.

I seen this type but not in action.

IYA

 

[Griff]

Powerheads

Thanks for the info Iya
i'm not looking for a shark killer, well not yet anyway.
it was just a thought. i was thinking that maybe they made killing fish too easy, like big brindle bass, and so outlawed it. so if someone came up with a devastating weapon then that may too be outlawed. i didnt think about the security issue.

mark

ps: your custom user text...is that your porn-star stage name?rofl

 

[Iyadiver]

Wha ha ha ha, now that u mentioned it....it got me thingking
Mr Long Lamp Post ???? Wha ha ha ha


Sorry, I think I mentioned about bang stick and the powerhead you mentioned might be the one with some sort of spearhead at its front, same principle but one works on the gas expansion, one work using the gas expansion to push a detachable spearhead or something.

Must check with the US guys why there are outlawed, I think it is not sportman like.....

IYA

PS Where is SA Spearo? I realy want him to write more on his coming project.

 

[SASpearo]

Over here !!

I've been out of the office for two days .... and today is my last day here. I'll be checking in a little less frequently now, but will still be around !!

I had some ideas over the weekend, whislt I was doing a bit of hunting at Arniston ... what a beautifull wreck, 800m offshore, 25m deep, absolutely insanely cold, but hey, it's just beautifull ... got 4 red romans, no yellowtail unfortunately ....

OK, thinking about recoil over a red wine and red roman on the coals (on the beach, of course) I was wondering - why does a gun's recoil kick it UPWARDS? I remember the wuestion from high school, but doom on me if I can remember the answer ...

Anyway, in stead of making the whole barrel slide back and forth to counter recoil, I'd rather get the muzzle to do that - I mean, have just the muzzle slide on the barrel in stead of having the whole barrel slide.

But this x-gun theory .... it makes a lot more sense. Why go through all the trouble to build a frankengun if you can come up with some form of x-gun ??

This got me thinking about the concept of spearguns - it shoots a shaft at a fish, using stored energy ... simplified. Some people use slip - tips ... ah ha - light went on in my head ...

Have the gun powered some way or another (I'm working on it) but change the shaft radically - I mean, why have a 2 m shaft? OK Sven, that's your queue ....

What about a 10cm bolt, with a groove running down the back half, a pin in the middle and a cable running through that? Sort of a "slip-shaft" idea - the bolt would go straight through the fish, get to the other side, and the cable would pull it in a T shape - wedged on the other side of the fish .... Mmmm ??

Now to get tis thing to fire from a gun is not gonna be that difficult .... but then we've got another problem. It's been well proven that a 6.5 shaft goes faster through the water, but has not got nescesarry momentum behind it to break through a fat tuna's gillplates. A 7.5mm or 8mm or even bigger, however, has got ample momentum to stop just about anything ....

So, once again a compromise needs to be made - have a 10cm bolt, but around 15mm thick, fired at high speed, or have a longer shaft of around 20 to 30 cm, around 8 to 10mm, and, well, of course fire it at high speed - because we can

Another issue with smaller projectiles (shafts ... ) is that it would not be stable in flight if travelling at low speeds ... now, as you can imagine, according to what I've just said, a bullet (Parrabellum is only 19mm * 9mm) would be very unstable - but it travels at over 1000 fps (foot per second) - I'm not sure of the exact speed and not interested at this point in time. So, at that speed (moer vinnig) it becomes aerodynamic - it 'flies' itself ...

Mmmm ....

Now to get a spearshaft to move at a relative speed (remember that water is denser than air - better dynamics if you don't take currents and temperature variations into account) you will need to have one of three things powering it:
a) 2000 pounds of rubber
b) 3000 PSI compressed air
c) explosion

As I'm only interested in two of the three (explosions above water - hell yeah! but under water? I'll skip ..) I'll be doing some jig - building and testing over at least the first month or two .... test some theories etc ...

Talking of building, I think it was Iya who asked if it's a woodwork shop ... well, it's a little more than that. It's got all the woodworking tools I can dream of (I had woodworking as a subject at school - along with science, maths and accounting (???????)) plus most of the metal working tools I'd need. I've even got a smallish metal lathe that'll be used for turning custom 'bolts' for the x-gun ... What I can't manufacture there, I can get my neighbour to do - he works at a engineering shop. One of my dad's friends works at the high-speed-automatic weapons manufacturing arm of Denel .... hee heee heeeeee .... gonna spend some time there !!!!

Oi ... my aching fingers .... gonna get some coffe now.

 

[Murat]

Saspearo

3000 psi air charge? No way....They use 3000 psi to shoot small airgun pellets and maximum velocity is 1200-1300 fps.Certainly i don`t need to say in AIR not in WATER (which has much more density than the air).You neen at least 40-50000 psi air charge to gain respectable speed even with your small bolts.This not the only problem. You need very thick tank wall to resist the presure of the deep water may be scuba tank.If you ready to carry big scuba tank on your back that connected to your gun that is ok.But still there is some problems how are you able to do such mechanism to transmit that big pressure power to the shaft????
Probably you will need something like hunting rifle design but i am not sure if it can resist the pressure from outside(water pressure) and internal pressure (from huge diving or scuba tank).If you barrel can`t handle this two big pressure can you imagine what will be happened??? Simple BoooooMMMM!!!!!...
It`s like hand made pipe bomb. If it`s explode you can not survive.:naughty
Then lets use safe powerbands (lots of them) and try to find how you can reduce the recoil.

 

[SASpearo]

Ha ha ha ...

Yeah, pressure would become too much of an issue - as well as the fact that you'd be losing power as you go deeper ....

So guess what I'm building jigs for??

 

[icarus pacific]

Re: Over here !!

Originally posted by SASpearo
- I mean, why have a 2 m shaft? OK Sven, that's your queue ...

Oh, I don't know... maybe because it's what you were born with?:hmm

sven DB's "doin' fine with the stubby"

 

[SASpearo]

Mwhaaa ha ha ha !

It's like the joke about the girl that will only marry a man wit 10 million in the bank, a porche in the garage and 8 inches in his pants ....

So she met a guy, told him this, and he replied "Honey, I got some 300 mill in the bank, four Porches, two lamborghinis and 3 ferraris, but there ain't no WAY I'm cutting of three inches just to marry you!"