Hi there Mark, nice to see you on board!
Do you think it's worth (and do you know if it's possible) to fit one of those barrel seal kits on it, such as Mamba, Kara-Yo and similar?
(frankly speaking, if the 90 shoots straight from 4 meters with only 14 bar pressure, I think it's not necessary to add any more power to it. But the forum is full of Mamba enthusiasts and this is a recurrent question).QUOTE]
Hi Spaghetti & crew,
I've gota say I never thought in my best hopes for the AIRbaletes would we be selling as many as we are in this economy. That's proof to me that despite the resistance for such a new revolutionary product people don't care and are throwing down for something better than the status quo pneumatic.
A couple misconceptions to clear up first though before I go on my infomercial rant about why this is the best pneumatic speargun currently on the market
AIRbalete 2 / Super AIRbalete , I don't know of anything in the pipeline and usually I would know, they spent 3 years developing the AIRbalete and it's here to stay in current form. The only thing they were talking about doing is eventually teaming up with the Mamba kit maker to sell it as an add on option for the gun, but given the fact that it really doesn't need it or benefit it in its current form, I don't have any updates on that development either.
Let me tell you about the tangible differences between this gun that are immediately apparent even to a novice user:
-A 90cm AIRbalete is still considered a muscle powered speargun and for all intents and purposes is shorter than the overall size of a 65cm band gun with the shaft. For this alone the range and power is remarcable.
-At 12-14 bar you can load it with your bare hand wearing a glove or even w/o a glove (not recommended) much less the standard pneumatic loader.
Why does it have more range, it's just physics right.
As someone justly pointed out the improvement and refinement of several small pneumatic speargun features contributes to an appreciable difference in overall performance over a standard stock pneumatic. Here are a few I can remember off the top of my head:
-11mm diameter inner piston chamber. Yes Mares Patented this clever reduction of internal chamber volume sometime around '92 and it allows for the same pressure of a larger 13mm inner chamber piston with a lower volume of air to displace therefore easier to load. BTW from what my sources told me, and it's possible I could be wrong, Mares simply could not patent a measurement just like a bicycle manufacturer could not take out a patent on 20" wheels for example is my understanding. I wasn't told it was 11,02. Omer's improvement in the piston region of the AIRbalete, uses silicone rather than rubber o-rings which last longer and create less friction on the chamber wall for loading and during the firing phase. This results in less loading effort and more than a 10% increase in piston velocity in their tests. In addition some Teflon seals and some ceramic slide ring on the piston also helps achieve this purpose.
-Marco Mariani is the genius in Omer (I've been working with him for years and the guy could teach physics and metallurgy classes at Harvard
) showed me another clever feature that my spear fisherman's noggin wouldn't have thought of before. Once you pull the trigger there are three airways making their way into the passage that shoves air into the back of the piston from the main cylinder/outer wall of the gun. This by comparison to one hole used in stock pneumatic maximizes air flow suddenly to the piston and makes it easier to load more easily displacing the air back into the outer chamber from the piston tube. Apparently this was a modification employed by some pneumatic fanatics before so it is not an entirely new untested concept. A lot of times in Omer a true and tried speargun modification gets noticed and considered for production status.
- There is no air pressure locked inside of the entire handle and less on the trigger pin and consequently trigger, which in most all pneumatics consists of a trigger pin connected to the trigger using the internal volume in the handle to capture it. This is always sealed in with an O-ring around the trigger pin. Once the o-ring wears and ages with time and dry rots the guns start leaking and that's what happens to a lot of conventional pneumatics and another scapegoat for their bad rap, seen it and worked on them for years personally. Also consider there is no internal high/low power reducer in the AIRbalete that sacrifices a portion of barrel volume typically in pneumatics. The reduces is simply a plastic cover over the alloy muzzle that can be manually turned to cover the piston port holes.
The AIRbalete uses
a push rod system pushing the pressurized firing pin from the main chamber (the barrel) that lowers the ratio of the pressure load on the push rod-trigger and consequently the trigger pull is considerably less than it is in a standard pneumatic not only because of a better engineered push rod but also thanks to small touches like a
special low friction coating applied to the stainless steel sear.
I think I just listed 5 improvements, 11mm chamber Vs 13, specialized low friction o-rings and low friction piston, more air dump holes in the piston chamber, trigger mechanism not effected by barrel pressure thanks to push rod design, low friction coated finish on sear for the trigger mechanism release. Wait, I forgot to mention there's no OIL required to lubricate the piston through the stroke each time, and I think that's the definition of the pneumatic air/oil concept! A very nice white teflon greece with an exponentially longer lifespan than oil is applied to the internals of each airbalete.
-Even more importantly in practical aiming terms the AIRbalete design aligns the handle and centers it with the piston chamber making aiming second nature similar to band guns, a conundrum that pneumatic guns have never resolved and that's led to their defunctness so to speak the last decade or so.
Sorry for taking so much bandwidth. If you're not bored yet reading this maybe you're a true speargun nut but you'd have to be to truly appreciate a high performance speargun like this that has a lot of thought put into it. I started with a pneumatic speargun and pneumatic guns are now exciting again. Clear waters,
ps- Spaghetti I dove with Andrea Calvino (from the U tube video) in the Florida Keys in March and he's not only the Omer poster boy but a darn good diver who is as much at home in 15' of water as in 100' in the Atlantic. Truly a great diver and hunter.
pps- I don't recommend don't buy this for your first pneumatic/airgun. I suggest a divers should familiarize themself and learn on a normal $150-200 more standard pneumatic so you can understand the concept and appreciate the differences later.
