Spearfishing with spearguns evolved rapidly as a sport after the end of World War II when the manufacture of the necessary equipment moved onto a commercial basis from the earlier beginnings in small workshops where enthusiasts often made much of their own equipment or adapted it from items intended for other purposes.
A new French company, Hurricane, was one of the first to make a full range of moulded rubber diving products as well as a range of spearguns. Being an innovator that strove to offer different equipment to that supplied by anyone else, Hurricane made items that were engineered beyond the level normally associated with spearfishing equipment in the pursuit of solutions to what were then considered problems (the words “needlessly complicated” come to mind for some of the rubber products). One of these solutions was their range of dry spring guns which had been developed to try and eliminate two problems with that type of weapon, the first being the loss of power as the long coil spring returned to its uncompressed length in water during the shot and the weight of these spearguns which the diver had to support as the guns had negative buoyancy being little more than a long metal tube with a spring inside it with every part of the gun being flooded. The reason why I am discussing this weapon here is that the dry spring gun was a competitor to the pneumatic gun, then in its infancy, which was also a descendant of the spring gun and as a consequence they bore many similarities to each other in their function and overall layout.
The Hurricane dry spring gun idea was invented by Pierre-Andre Martineau in 1942 and was the subject of a number of successive patents where the concept was progressively refined to the form in which it was eventually produced for sale (in a 1945 patent) as the “Carabine” model which was eventually available in four different lengths. Basically the gun was of the usual compression spring gun format, but with a larger diameter barrel tube front and rear and with a cast alloy mid-handle made up in two sections. However instead of a clamshell moulding with left and right hand sides and a gasket positioned in-between them to seal the two halves together and where they gripped onto the barrel tube (his first 1942 idea which was not that practical) the production mid-handle casting had an upper receiver which mounted the front and rear barrel tubes and a lower grip section that sealed onto it with a gasket between them to keep water out of the hollow shell formed by the handle interior. The external pivoting trigger operated through a short push rod that penetrated a seal in the lower grip section in order to activate the two-piece trigger mechanism installed inside the handle interior which was intended to remain dry, however that was only true once the flooded gun had been emptied of water. The idea was that with water removed from the interior of the gun the propulsion spring was no longer affected by water drag opposing its coils expanding during the shot and the buoyancy provided by the “air bubble” inside the gun served to offset some of the weight of the gun in the water. The “Carabine” gun was never designed to be a floater as even with larger than normal barrel tubes the water displacement of the gun was too low to achieve that outcome. Unfortunately when completely flooded the gun was even heavier than usual for a spring gun thanks to all the extra metal used in its construction.
Originally Martineau intended the gun to be drained of water, which could enter the gun during muzzle loading, by raising the cocked gun horizontally above the water’s surface and operating a sprung loaded plug situated in the base of the grip handle by pulling it downwards. The “Carabine” name was actually inscribed on this round metal plug in the bottom of the handle butt, along with the words “Hurricane Sous Marine”. The hollow grip handle would thus serve as a sump or the low point in the gun through which all the water inside the gun then drained out. Once emptied of water the gun could be submerged with the proviso that the muzzle was always kept inclined slightly downwards in order to stop air bubbling out of it and water rushing in, thus in a sense the Hurricane spring gun functioned like an open bottom diving bell. Evidently this arrangement was not ideal as it would be all too easy for those who dived under to shoot their quarry to lose the air bubble if they raised the gun’s muzzle too much, as distinct from those who only shot their guns from the surface and could keep them pointing downwards. Plus increasing ambient pressure with greater depth would cause water to enter the barrel in any case as the air trapped inside the gun was being progressively compressed, which was always going to be an ongoing problem with an incompletely sealed off interior being used in these spearguns.
The “Carabine” gun was revised by eliminating the handle drain plug and converting it into a screw cap access point for lubricating the trigger mechanism, hence the external appearance remained unchanged even though the functionality had. In its place was a reciprocating pump on the rear of the gun which slid back and forth over the exterior of the rear barrel tube, the pump’s handle also serving as the pump body which breathed air through a hole in its rear end which the operator blocked off with a finger placed over it when pushing the pump handle downwards. Naturally to pump air into the gun the rear end had to be held up above the surface and the water inside the cocked gun was then displaced to flow out of the muzzle opening after passing around the spear already inside the barrel. The instructions for the gun claim that it took only two strokes of the rear pump to empty it, whether that is true or not I don’t know, but it tells us that the pump was not a surcompressor as was claimed in the gun’s advertising material. The implication that it was a surcompressor is probably an oblique reference to the then emerging pneumatic gun, with connotations of spring and air power boosting the “Carabine” gun’s performance, however the Hurricane “Carabine” was never going to be an air powered gun no matter how watertight it may have been made for one fundamental reason. The short piston pushed by the propulsion spring had the sear tooth acting on its front end rather than at the rear, so any air pressure in the gun would operate on both ends of the piston and contribute nothing to the spear propulsion. Also this piston at the front of the long coil spring carried no seals, although there was a seal at the muzzle entrance to hinder water entering the gun if the diver momentarily raised the muzzle. This rubber muzzle seal could be thought of as a precursor to a modern vacuum barrel muzzle seal as it had to have the spear shaft and shaft tail stop pass through it without sustaining any damage to its sealing lip. The idea was that air and water could be pushed outwards through this muzzle seal (when using the rear pump), but water would not enter going in the opposite direction. While the inner barrel was not under a vacuum, it was originally at atmospheric pressure or slightly above it depending on how far down in the water the muzzle projected when pumping ceased, any sealing action would be difficult to maintain at a reasonable depth when the gun was taken underwater in a dive.
Having the sear tooth hold the spear in the barrel is a direct carry over from the spring gun which operated the same way whether or not there was a piston on the nose of the coil spring, a piston being necessary if the propulsion spring diameter was much larger than the spear diameter. Interestingly spring gun barrels were then 13 mm, 12 mm and 11 mm in diameter (the Cressi “Saetta” at 17 mm diameter required a piston), which probably determined the size of future pneumatic guns as the tubing would be available with 13 mm providing the most performance from the low start pressures being used in the early pneumatic spearguns.
Well engineered and no doubt expensive both to manufacture and for customers to purchase, the Hurricane “Carabine” was produced in four different models, the “Mosquito” (no rear pump as it was virtually a short pistol), the “Baby”, the “Simoun” and the “Rafale” which was the longest model. The stated underwater ranges of these weapons were an extraordinary 4, 6, 8 and 10 metres respectively! Somehow I find those numbers very hard to believe, but at the time (late forties and fifties) the public would have little opportunity to test such claims, unless they bought a gun!
Surviving examples of the Hurricane “Carabine” are usually found in speargun collections and are often incomplete (no spear, no springs, even though it was claimed the propulsion springs were stainless or non-corroding), hence the prospect of shooting one now in order to check out the actual performance is low, but the guns certainly looked the part and would have impressed any diver who saw them due to their styling and high quality of construction. The pneumatic speargun, once perfected to achieve the reliability provided by coil spring power, would soon eclipse any spring gun by providing the same or greater performance in a much shorter package if comparable muzzle loading effort was used as the long coil spring of the spring gun was a source of considerable inefficiency and demanded a certain length to house it inside any gun.
A new French company, Hurricane, was one of the first to make a full range of moulded rubber diving products as well as a range of spearguns. Being an innovator that strove to offer different equipment to that supplied by anyone else, Hurricane made items that were engineered beyond the level normally associated with spearfishing equipment in the pursuit of solutions to what were then considered problems (the words “needlessly complicated” come to mind for some of the rubber products). One of these solutions was their range of dry spring guns which had been developed to try and eliminate two problems with that type of weapon, the first being the loss of power as the long coil spring returned to its uncompressed length in water during the shot and the weight of these spearguns which the diver had to support as the guns had negative buoyancy being little more than a long metal tube with a spring inside it with every part of the gun being flooded. The reason why I am discussing this weapon here is that the dry spring gun was a competitor to the pneumatic gun, then in its infancy, which was also a descendant of the spring gun and as a consequence they bore many similarities to each other in their function and overall layout.
The Hurricane dry spring gun idea was invented by Pierre-Andre Martineau in 1942 and was the subject of a number of successive patents where the concept was progressively refined to the form in which it was eventually produced for sale (in a 1945 patent) as the “Carabine” model which was eventually available in four different lengths. Basically the gun was of the usual compression spring gun format, but with a larger diameter barrel tube front and rear and with a cast alloy mid-handle made up in two sections. However instead of a clamshell moulding with left and right hand sides and a gasket positioned in-between them to seal the two halves together and where they gripped onto the barrel tube (his first 1942 idea which was not that practical) the production mid-handle casting had an upper receiver which mounted the front and rear barrel tubes and a lower grip section that sealed onto it with a gasket between them to keep water out of the hollow shell formed by the handle interior. The external pivoting trigger operated through a short push rod that penetrated a seal in the lower grip section in order to activate the two-piece trigger mechanism installed inside the handle interior which was intended to remain dry, however that was only true once the flooded gun had been emptied of water. The idea was that with water removed from the interior of the gun the propulsion spring was no longer affected by water drag opposing its coils expanding during the shot and the buoyancy provided by the “air bubble” inside the gun served to offset some of the weight of the gun in the water. The “Carabine” gun was never designed to be a floater as even with larger than normal barrel tubes the water displacement of the gun was too low to achieve that outcome. Unfortunately when completely flooded the gun was even heavier than usual for a spring gun thanks to all the extra metal used in its construction.
Originally Martineau intended the gun to be drained of water, which could enter the gun during muzzle loading, by raising the cocked gun horizontally above the water’s surface and operating a sprung loaded plug situated in the base of the grip handle by pulling it downwards. The “Carabine” name was actually inscribed on this round metal plug in the bottom of the handle butt, along with the words “Hurricane Sous Marine”. The hollow grip handle would thus serve as a sump or the low point in the gun through which all the water inside the gun then drained out. Once emptied of water the gun could be submerged with the proviso that the muzzle was always kept inclined slightly downwards in order to stop air bubbling out of it and water rushing in, thus in a sense the Hurricane spring gun functioned like an open bottom diving bell. Evidently this arrangement was not ideal as it would be all too easy for those who dived under to shoot their quarry to lose the air bubble if they raised the gun’s muzzle too much, as distinct from those who only shot their guns from the surface and could keep them pointing downwards. Plus increasing ambient pressure with greater depth would cause water to enter the barrel in any case as the air trapped inside the gun was being progressively compressed, which was always going to be an ongoing problem with an incompletely sealed off interior being used in these spearguns.
The “Carabine” gun was revised by eliminating the handle drain plug and converting it into a screw cap access point for lubricating the trigger mechanism, hence the external appearance remained unchanged even though the functionality had. In its place was a reciprocating pump on the rear of the gun which slid back and forth over the exterior of the rear barrel tube, the pump’s handle also serving as the pump body which breathed air through a hole in its rear end which the operator blocked off with a finger placed over it when pushing the pump handle downwards. Naturally to pump air into the gun the rear end had to be held up above the surface and the water inside the cocked gun was then displaced to flow out of the muzzle opening after passing around the spear already inside the barrel. The instructions for the gun claim that it took only two strokes of the rear pump to empty it, whether that is true or not I don’t know, but it tells us that the pump was not a surcompressor as was claimed in the gun’s advertising material. The implication that it was a surcompressor is probably an oblique reference to the then emerging pneumatic gun, with connotations of spring and air power boosting the “Carabine” gun’s performance, however the Hurricane “Carabine” was never going to be an air powered gun no matter how watertight it may have been made for one fundamental reason. The short piston pushed by the propulsion spring had the sear tooth acting on its front end rather than at the rear, so any air pressure in the gun would operate on both ends of the piston and contribute nothing to the spear propulsion. Also this piston at the front of the long coil spring carried no seals, although there was a seal at the muzzle entrance to hinder water entering the gun if the diver momentarily raised the muzzle. This rubber muzzle seal could be thought of as a precursor to a modern vacuum barrel muzzle seal as it had to have the spear shaft and shaft tail stop pass through it without sustaining any damage to its sealing lip. The idea was that air and water could be pushed outwards through this muzzle seal (when using the rear pump), but water would not enter going in the opposite direction. While the inner barrel was not under a vacuum, it was originally at atmospheric pressure or slightly above it depending on how far down in the water the muzzle projected when pumping ceased, any sealing action would be difficult to maintain at a reasonable depth when the gun was taken underwater in a dive.
Having the sear tooth hold the spear in the barrel is a direct carry over from the spring gun which operated the same way whether or not there was a piston on the nose of the coil spring, a piston being necessary if the propulsion spring diameter was much larger than the spear diameter. Interestingly spring gun barrels were then 13 mm, 12 mm and 11 mm in diameter (the Cressi “Saetta” at 17 mm diameter required a piston), which probably determined the size of future pneumatic guns as the tubing would be available with 13 mm providing the most performance from the low start pressures being used in the early pneumatic spearguns.
Well engineered and no doubt expensive both to manufacture and for customers to purchase, the Hurricane “Carabine” was produced in four different models, the “Mosquito” (no rear pump as it was virtually a short pistol), the “Baby”, the “Simoun” and the “Rafale” which was the longest model. The stated underwater ranges of these weapons were an extraordinary 4, 6, 8 and 10 metres respectively! Somehow I find those numbers very hard to believe, but at the time (late forties and fifties) the public would have little opportunity to test such claims, unless they bought a gun!
Surviving examples of the Hurricane “Carabine” are usually found in speargun collections and are often incomplete (no spear, no springs, even though it was claimed the propulsion springs were stainless or non-corroding), hence the prospect of shooting one now in order to check out the actual performance is low, but the guns certainly looked the part and would have impressed any diver who saw them due to their styling and high quality of construction. The pneumatic speargun, once perfected to achieve the reliability provided by coil spring power, would soon eclipse any spring gun by providing the same or greater performance in a much shorter package if comparable muzzle loading effort was used as the long coil spring of the spring gun was a source of considerable inefficiency and demanded a certain length to house it inside any gun.
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