• Welcome to the DeeperBlue.com Forums, the largest online community dedicated to Freediving, Scuba Diving and Spearfishing. To gain full access to the DeeperBlue.com Forums you must register for a free account. As a registered member you will be able to:

    • Join over 44,280+ fellow diving enthusiasts from around the world on this forum
    • Participate in and browse from over 516,210+ posts.
    • Communicate privately with other divers from around the world.
    • Post your own photos or view from 7,441+ user submitted images.
    • All this and much more...

    You can gain access to all this absolutely free when you register for an account, so sign up today!

New Airgun By Eskwad (imerson)

Thread Status: Hello , There was no answer in this thread for more than 60 days.
It can take a long time to get an up-to-date response or contact with relevant users.
Looks like a restyled "Cyrano", only with a 13 mm barrel! So it also has a long snout with a separate inner bulkhead located inside the outer nose cone, not a feature which I particularly like on the "Cyrano" as you lose water displacement/volume and thus buoyancy up front, plus tank capacity for that inner barrel length of gun. That feature never seemed to affect sales of the "Cyrano", so not worth worrying about I guess, plus it looks like they have pushed the bulkhead end wall a bit further forwards in the gun, the brim on the "top hat" being thicker. The "Eskwad" certainly follows the usual layout of the Mares guns, in fact Mares have a patent on the side swinging line release seen here.

A strong point is made of the gun being completely made in France, so is this resistance to pneumatic guns and their components being made in China? The Salvimar "Vintair" also made a statement about it being manufactured in Italy, once you would have taken that for granted, so maybe quality concerns are having an effect. Sporasub's "Stealth" had some quirky faults and Omer are having a few problems with their new guns and guess where their parts are made. Teething problems are probably hard to sort out over the phone with guys speaking a different language, or the guys to whom they in turn talk to.

Some years back people were enthusiastically pronouncing the pneumatic gun was dead, but they are coming out of the woodwork now and I think that is great to see. If only they would standardize on one common hand pump connection size rather than the drawer full of pumps you need to have on hand these days. At least you can swap spear tails on shafts.

Low power is said to be a reduction of 2/3 on the main power, now I wonder how they do that as partitioning systems give low power over 50% and I don't see such a bulkhead in the schematic, so maybe it uses a throttle system, but there is no sign of it or its control knob on the gun illustrations shown on the web-site.
 
For interest I have annotated the schematic for the gun based on my experience with other pneumatic spearguns. The unknown factor is how does the air in the main compressed air reservoir flow through to the "pre-chamber" which is very small, the "pre-chamber" being the space containing the sear lever position and connecting directly to the inner barrel. Air flow must pass through the rear bulkhead, shown in white, via a port which we cannot see. There is also no sign of a non-return valve in the rear bulkhead which is usually located there to provide the "easy loading" feature when a power regulator transfer port is closed by operating an external selector knob or lever. The front and rear pressure bulkheads look very similar, the nose cone being a cap on the front end and the rear handle in a sense being a cap on the rear end. However the rear handle interior will be pressurized while the nose cone is not, same as on the Mares "Cyrano".
 
Last edited:
Thanks to the recent "Black Friday" sale there was an Eskwad Air Max on offer for a reasonable price, so I ordered it, mainly to find out how the low power switch works. These guns by Imersion have been around a few years now, but you never read anything about them. Curiosity got the better of me! Slightly quirky looks may not have done the gun any favours and the construction quality is an unknown, although Imersion band guns have been popular years ago when the Challenger and Merou D'Or guns first appeared. The Concept Triaxx Carbon made a splash when it was announced and then seemed to disappear without trace, it having its barrel replaced by three (or four, with two grouped together) thin carbon rods for most of its length. I remember seeing one in a shop and the owner said that he would love to get rid of it, everyone looked at it, but no one would buy it!


 
Last edited:
Reactions: foxfish
I knew you were going to buy one, Pete!

Please share some pictures when you get it.
 
Yes, I plan to do an examination of it, in fact I would not have bought it otherwise. I cannot remember the retail prices when they first came out, but there originally was a 50 cm, 75 cm and a 100 cm version. The one I purchased is a 90 cm which must have been added later and the price was less than the mainstream brands, but more than the Hang Fung "Aqua Gear" and its many brand name variations sold by bottom feeder companies. So maybe Imersion are getting rid of them at discount prices.

Due to a strong demand from the Eastern European freedivers, we have developed in our plant located in Thiers our pneumatic gun the Eskwad AIR. Possibly the subsequent action by Salvimar in offering a badge engineered version of the "Vintair" under the "Scorpena" brand name in Eastern Europe put a cramp on their sales as that “strong demand” may have evaporated.
 
Last edited:
Just noticed the same gun for sale at Pinnacle Dive Australia, on the Gold Coast, for $165 - 50cm, $175 - 75cm, and $185 - 100cm. Not selling parts though...
 
floatingbeatle said:
Just noticed the same gun for sale at Pinnacle Dive Australia, on the Gold Coast, for $165 - 50cm, $175 - 75cm, and $185 - 100cm. Not selling parts though...
Click to expand...
The guns may be becoming an "orphan" and the resellers are simply unloading them. At under 200 dollars they are reasonably cheap and should give no trouble for a year or two. The 50 cm at 165 dollars is only OK if you want a variable power gun, but guns like the single power Salvimar “Vintair 50" (or the Scorpena V, same gun) can be had for a lot less in 50 cm size. 175 bucks for a 75 cm is about par for the course, but importantly the gun comes with an 8 mm stainless steel screw-on tip spear which is what you want for hitting power down range and around rocks. A Cressi-SUB SL70 is about 280 dollars for a similar gun, but has a lot of service history being sold for decades. I did not buy the 100 cm as I already have a Predathor 100 cm gun.
 
Reactions: floatingbeatle
The Eskwad Air Max speargun arrived today and turned out to be the 100 cm model! Evidently the 90 cm listed on their advert was a typo on their part. The gun when taken out of the shipping box immediately answered one question and that is the power regulator is the usual lever moving in a dogleg selector gate which is on the left hand side of the handgrip. They never show a photo of that side of the gun in the photos that I have previously seen. The paddle set into the bodywork in front of the trigger is the safety as it swings down and blocks any access to the trigger.
 
Here are some photos taken while swatting away the pesky Australian bush fly which descends on us in summer in large numbers.






Note that the gun comes with a detachable tip with a connecting cable and not an integral tip, which is good as many guns seem to have gone Hawaiian or Tahitian when that is not necessarily what you want.
 
Last edited:
Reactions: floatingbeatle and tromic

Are you happy with the purchase Pete? Is quality up to scratch? Looks to be a good buy if you could get parts or substitutes for it.
 
Yes, I think the gun was a good buy and externally the quality of finish looks very good. Everything lines up and there are no weak looking parts as I have seen in some other guns, not mentioning any names. The muzzle ports are large and the silvery muzzle is free of any blemishes. The gun came depressurized which is a first as despite regulations saying they should not be every new gun that I have purchased was pressurized to a high level. The breakaway tip is a first in terms of being stock on a new gun, although I think that is most likely because this is the longest model. The instructions are rather minimal and there is no exploded parts diagram. The air pump has a unique end fitting, as to be expected, which means the hand pump drawer grows every larger with each new brand of gun acquired.
 
Reactions: floatingbeatle
Earlier on this thread I queried the low power shot being 2/3rds of full power, but if the rear chamber or pre-chamber is much smaller than on say a Mares gun then it could be that the compression ratio on low power is 10. If we look at the high power-low power graph we can see that low power would then be about 1/3 using the area of the compression ratio curve bounded by the purple rectangle.

Note that in the previous graph for a Mares gun we assumed the compression ratio for low power was 5.0 and therefore used the curve shape enclosed in the green rectangle. (see below) On these guns low power is approximately half power.

Just to refresh memories if we took a gun and translated its tank volume to a long tube of the same diameter as the inner barrel and fixed it to the end of the inner barrel then we would have converted the gun to a very long monotube which these graphical analyses are based on. The reason why pneumatic guns have fat diameter tanks is to shorten them, otherwise guns would be very long and unwieldly (which once they were in the distant past).

Based on this analysis the Eskwad gun would need to have a larger pre-chamber for it to obtain 2/3rds on low power, which it does not appear to have on the existing schematic diagram.

P.S. Just reading the advertising again it says "the power reduction system allows a reduction of 2/3 of the power." So it looks like the power left is a third which would fit in with what has been demonstrated above.
 
Last edited:
I checked the Imersion website and the gun is no longer listed, so I suggest that if you can find one then buy it, especially the longer ones at the knock down prices. PInnacle Dive on the Gold Coast, OZ, seems to have all 3 sizes of the gun as I just checked. Prices 165, 175 and 185 dollars.
 
Last edited:
Reactions: floatingbeatle
The Eskwad Air Max 100 cm floats horizontal and high in the water like a submarine, so it is good floater. The hand pump handle needs to be pulled right back to breathe as the pump breather holes are well back in the pump body. A few pump strokes pumped nothing as I never pulled the pump handle back far enough!
 
Reactions: floatingbeatle
Snout comparison of the Eskwad and the original Cyrano, the former has slightly greater outer diameters than the latter. Both have 40 mm OD tanks.
 
Last edited:
Here is a monotube pneumatic speargun, the Nemrod "Torpedero" from the fifties. Not Nemrod's first pneumatic gun, it is a forward latching gun with a form of spring gun trigger mechanism installed in the muzzle which is operated by a slide trigger in the mid-handle using a pull rod. This is actually the layout used by the earliest pneumatic spearguns, but they had a longer pull rod placing the handle further back in a rifle shoulder stock arrangement.

If you change the length of the spear tail then you alter the gun's compression ratio. The spear for this gun is rather short, so the compression ratio is approximately 2.0.
 
Last edited:
Eskwad (Imersion) hand pump with Salvimar and Mares pumps shown for comparison purposes on either side.


The nose on the Eskwad pump pushes into an "O" ring sitting in a recess in the rear of the speargun that seals on the machined outer step on the front end of the hand pump.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Menu
Log in
Register
Cookies are required to use this site. You must accept them to continue using the site. Learn more…