Nemrod Mid-Handle Classic Layout Pneumatic Spearguns

[popgun pete]

"Nemrod" used to be a very big name in diving, in fact probably the largest back in the sixties and seventies. In the USA it was distributed as "Seamless Rubber-Nemrod" and here in Oz simply as "Nemrod". Any sports store carrying stocks of pneumatic spearguns, there were not that many and dive shops were still in their infancy, had racks of Nemrod spearguns with gleaming blue barrels and black grips for divers to drool over. The "Clipper" series arrived in the seventies and were of a simplified construction and solidly built, as they had dispensed with many small parts and sub-assemblies that had abounded in earlier "Nemrod" pneumatic spearguns which had probably made them more expensive to produce. The "Clipper" series included the "Mini-Clipper" through to "Clipper (models) I, II and III" in increasing lengths of barrels and rear air reservoirs. The single moulding centre handle was the main feature of the guns and it was interesting to see that Nemrod's last "big-banger" pneumatic gun, the "Mariner", had a similar layout for the grip's centre section, but it was a variable power gun with quite different internals to the "Clipper" models. It also had a giant rear air tank that was 50 mm in diameter(!), compared to the "Clipper" gun's 45 mm diameter. Shooting the "Mariner III" you needed a good grip on the mid-handle or it would take your head off, so not really a gun for looking down the barrel to sight it!

The "Mariner" series arrived here far too late in the pneumatic speargun cycle as floating rear handle pneumatic spearguns (Mares "Sten", Cressi-Sub "Superleggero", etc.) had already dominated the speargun scene before it was released. As far as I know "Nemrod" never released a rear handle pneumatic model, although one of it smaller Spanish rivals "Copino", who produced a very similar pneumatic speargun line to that of "Nemrod", did do so.

The "Clipper" outlived the "Mariner" in production and the final "Clipper" series had black centre grips with finger indentations in the lower handle and a line release finger in the trigger's finger guard. Originally released in blue and black, the "Clipper" guns then went to a silvery barrel and tank combined with an orange plastic grip colour scheme before returning to more or less all-black with a few red plastic parts in the final models.

 

[foxfish]

I can remember them all shiny, hanging on he shop wall. Wish I had bought one but they were expensive compared to rubber at the time.

 

[popgun pete]

I can remember them all shiny, hanging on he shop wall. Wish I had bought one but they were expensive compared to rubber at the time.

When they were new I could not afford to buy them either, but some bargains were to be had when guys quit the sport and dumped all their gear on the market after some nasty experience or near-drowning.

There is a bit of info that I should add concerning the demise of the mid-handle pneumatic speargun here that may not pertain elsewhere. This determining factor was spearfishing on scuba was banned, first in New South Wales, then later in the other States of Australia. Before that mid-handle pneumatic spearguns were scuba divers' first choice as they were powerful, very manoeuvrable and were sinkers, thus a released gun did not have to be retrieved from the surface.

These scuba guys were pretty disappointed when their sport was officially banned, although not everyone obeys the rules, so some were still looking for heavy pneumatic spearguns even after the activity was closed down. Now I know spearfishing on scuba is quite legal in some countries, so they welcomed guns like the Russian mid-handle "Seabear" AKA "Pirometer RP" which are definite sinkers, in fact any heavier and you could remove weights from your weight belt (though one better not drop the gun in that case). Spearfishing on scuba is serious stuff as the guys are not shooting tiddlers and they have a big task extracting holed up fish from their lairs which means serious physical work underwater. Unfortunately in the old days here the scuba spearfishing guys completely overdid it, resulting in all the big Cod and Grouper being decimated and becoming a very uncommon sight all along the more easily accessible parts of the coastline.

 

[popgun pete]

Here is the Nemrod "Clipper" piston with a "Cyrano" piston alongside it for a size comparison. Note the small hole in the side of the Nemrod piston to stop hydraulic lock preventing the spear tail jamming into the face of the piston and also allowing a way for water to escape the space between the shock absorber anvil face and the front seal on the piston body with the gun discharged. This small hole also allows oil to penetrate the space when some is introduced into the muzzle for post-dive maintenance purposes.

 

[poildeq]

I have a mariner any idea where I can buy the pump

 

[popgun pete]

I have a mariner any idea where I can buy the pump

All the later Nemrod guns use the same hand pump from the late sixties "Silver" series onwards, however the ribbed and grooved rubber pump seals usually fail through old age. All my Nemrod hand pumps have failed now, so I replace the pump piston and use an "O" ring instead for the seal. You will find old Nemrod pumps on eBay, but even if they work initially the seal soon gives out and I don't know of any replacements. The youngest hand pumps will be the ones used on the final "Clipper" guns (black colour scheme), but good luck with finding one of those. My "Mariner" hand pump worked until recently, but it just conked out two weeks ago when I was re-pressurizing the "Clipper" that I had shown on this thread, after repairing it (that is why the gun was in pieces).

 

[poildeq]

I hoped that. Ebay would also but it has been a futile wait thanks

 

[popgun pete]

Or you can make an adaptor for another hand pump. Check the "Comando" (Commando) thread, I seem to remember someone made himself an adaptor to use a much more readily available hand pump.

I just checked: http://forums.deeperblue.com/threads/nemrod-comando-speargun-parts.83802/page-3

 

[poildeq]

That's fantastic thanks mate

 

[popgun pete]

Here is where it all began for "Nemrod", their original pneumatic speargun patent from 1951 (in Spain) submitted by Senores Don Juan and Don Pedro Vilarrubis Ferrando who were then listed as residents of Barcelona. This gun was actually their lever-operated surcompressor pneumatic model, you muzzle load the gun first and then swing the pivoting lever backwards to decrease the volume of the rear mounted air reservoir and thus boost the internal air pressure available for shooting. All Nemrod's many pneumatic spearguns evolve from this gun until their new models appear such as the "Silver" series with the full length concentric reservoirs in the late sixties ("Comando", "Corsario", "Bucanero" and "Filibustero"). Nemrod actually stamp the patent numbers on their guns. The Nemrod series IV guns still referred to this patent, albeit the US version of it filed in 1952 and published in 1956, but it is the same as the Spanish patent with a slightly less detailed diagram than the one shown here.

Note that the central handgrip is a modified spring gun handle with a connecting element poking out of one side of the alloy grip housing to reach back to the arm that controls the sear lever.

 

[popgun pete]

The Spanish patent drawing is accurate enough to electronically manipulate and show exactly how the gun operates, you can see that it was a long gun now that the images are rearranged in their order of assembly.

 

[popgun pete]

This gun was their "Crucero" model and was made right up until the end of production of the Nemrod "Series IV" guns. Up until that time Nemrod pneumatic spearguns had the spear travelling only in the front barrel section of the gun, the rear tank was simply an air reservoir containing compressed air and had no inner barrel tube inside it at all. The sear lever was positioned in the handgrip section in the centre of the gun, however when the sear lever went to the rear of the air tank in the later guns (Silver series and onwards) that was the end of the line for this supercharging lever system. I doubt that its passing was considered a great loss as pneumatic spearguns had evolved significantly in the intervening years with much larger capacity air tanks.

 

[poildeq]

Our resident speargun Historian I love it

 

[popgun pete]

Here is a "Crucero" from the Series IV range manufactured by Nemrod. The gun received the current grip handle used in each series, earlier guns had an "outrigger" trigger in that the trigger was mounted on one side of the gun and was bent (or cast) so that the hook section that you pulled on with your finger was on the centreline of the gun as usual. "Outrigger" triggers are a feature of many early pneumatic spearguns such as the Salles brothers guns produced in France (by Rene) and the USA (by John) as the "Sallematic" and the "Airmatic" spearguns respectively. The "Airmatic" is discussed here: http://www.speardiver.com/spearguns-polespears/4637-vintage-speargun-photos-2.html

Photo was taken by Ron Mullins and can be viewed here as well: http://www.skindivinghistory.com/gear/spearguns/vintage/Nemrod-Crucero.html

 

[popgun pete]

Note that to provide some fore-aft balance of the gun when hunting with it Nemrod used to add a balance bar that screwed into the rear end of the gun. On the early guns this was actually the handpump which you can see in the diagram and the photo above. If you did not want water in the handpump then it was a good idea to remove it and use a balance bar instead which Nemrod provided in their later guns right up until and including the Series IV guns. I remember looking at a brand new Nemrod Series IV gun when I was first thinking of going spearfishing (as an impressionable youngster) and noted that it had a short, bulbous rear air tank which could either be fitted with the handpump or a similar looking but thin diameter balance bar to even up the weight distribution with the spear loaded in the gun. When I eventually purchased a Nemrod pneumatic (after selling my bicycle to raise the money) these guns had been superseded by the Silver series models and consequently I bought a "Comando", my very first speargun, after using a telescopic handspear when I first started. I soon switched to a band gun as this gave me longer range and a floating gun after the shot, but the arrival of the Mares "Sten" which was a floater soon had me using a pneumatic gun again and, employing whatever underwater weapon was suitable for the job, I have used either type ever since.

Also note that with the "Crucero", which already had the bulk of the pivoting rear lever to provide some fore-aft balance, you could remove the handpump and replace it with a short cap which is shown in figure 5. This short rear cap also allowed the pivoting lever to swing further back than I have shown in the diagram, otherwise the handle would foul on the long handpump body, but the lever's travel arc is moving more vertically by then, so not much more motion of the telescoping rear reservoir tube is available in the direction of the gun's longitudinal axis. The later "Crucero" has the lever handle curved in order to wrap the gun body when swung back, reversing the shape shown in the patent diagram in terms of the lever's cross-sectional profile.

 

[popgun pete]

This is how Nemrod evolved their early pneumatic guns by moving the trigger that controlled the sear lever into the grip handle rather than it being a remote trigger using an external bar and lever connector which was positioned outside the pressurized air spaces. By Series IV the Nemrod guns used a sear lever very similar to what you see in a Mares "Sten" with a short vertical transmission pin pushed by the external plastic trigger located completely inside the trigger finger guard space, although the Nemrod version was produced much earlier. That allowed Nemrod to get rid of the "outrigger trigger" which was in a sense a throwback to the "Salles" guns, only the Ferrando brothers had disconnected it from the "true trigger" in their very first guns by using their spring gun handle up front to operate the "true trigger" located behind it with a remote trigger. A drawback of doing that was that it made their original pneumatic gun longer in the centre section than it needed to be.

You can see more photos of one of these guns here: http://forums.deeperblue.com/threads/nemrod-speargun.96592/. Whether it is Series II or Series III I do not know, but it is from before Series IV.

 

[popgun pete]

Here is the earliest gun much as it would have looked in use, I expect that the supercharging lever would have changed shape fairly early during gun development even though you don't sight along the barrel with these guns, you use "point and shoot" instead. Spring guns were fired from over the shoulder (like a "Bazooka") if they were very long (some were 2 metres in length), so such an arrangement was not considered unusual in those early days. Inset shows a spring gun handle from Nemrod, note that the handle shapes are not exactly the same as patent drawings are seldom engineering drawings or blueprints.

Nemrod spring gun handle.

 

[poildeq]

Do you own that gun

 

[popgun pete]

Do you own that gun

No, it belongs to a French collector.

 

[popgun pete]

Here is a schematic diagram of a Nemrod Series IV "Goleta" which shows how the sear lever is installed inside the mid-handle grip section. Note that the front and rear tubes are slightly offset, the larger diameter rear tube is simply an air reservoir that contains nothing else, while the front tube is the actual barrel that the piston slides in. This diagram is taken from a Russian book on spearfishing, "Underwater Hunting" or "ПОДВОДНАЯ ОХОТА" and I doubt that the inlet valve is a ball valve as shown, but the rest of it looks to be reasonably accurate. I actually own one of these Series IV "Goleta" guns and have pulled the lower grip handle off and removed the plastic trigger and short transmission pin, but to get the sear lever out the rear tank needs to be unscrewed and that is proving reluctant to remove. The sear lever must be mounted in a cylindrical insert that is trapped in place inside the alloy outer housing by the rear tank tube to eliminate any joins that would otherwise require sealing to make the entire assembly pressure-tight. It is an interesting construction that would be costly to make today, especially as each gun model in the series had some different parts unique to itself while sharing some others. This would then add to the total parts inventory for production requirements and therefore incur more cost in producing the entire range of Series IV models. Today many pneumatic spearguns just use longer or shorter tube sections for their inner barrel and tank, along with the appropriate length spear, hence a range of models in a given type (e.g. a "Sten") is much more cost-effective to make these days as all other parts are interchangeable. Exceptions are the hydroformed tank guns as there it is not just a case of cutting cylindrical tank tubes to length, but then you do have to pay more for them.

Mid-handle pneumatic guns like the later Nemrod "Galeon" and "Clipper" models have an inner barrel tube which extends the full length of the gun, so the spear (plus speartip) that they use is longer than the gun, while the early Nemrod guns use a spear which is generally shorter than the gun and that is the clue to a pneumatic gun's internal layout even if you know nothing else about it.