Omer quitting Pneumatic Spearguns

That was actually AUD 150, they have gone back to AUD 300, but originally they were AUD 450! Anyone who paid 450 had rocks in their head, although they may have thought being “Italian” it was worth the money. The tips are interchangeable and Omer sell a bunch of different tips.

Here is one for AUD 155.99 https://www.scubastore.com/scuba-diving/omer-air-xii-90/137076838/p plus shipping.

I bought my Sporasub One Air from them and they had no trouble shipping to Australia only a month or so back. I only bought it because it was cheap.
Actually make that 4 months back, I just checked.

Adreno has the 90 cm for AUD 299 and shipping is 15 dollars. It was Adreno that had them down to 150 for a few days, then went back to 299.
Buying from them you will receive it in a few days. From them it will be in its original box.

That is a very short gun and really only good for holes and close up work. This being an Omer thread it is better to look at the respective thread for those guns. Buy a gun for the situation that you want to use it in rather than the price. There are not huge differences between pneumatic guns as basically they are a piston travelling in a pipe surrounded by an air tank, but handles suit some people more than others and the ability to wave the gun around. The Airbalete family was conceived to woo band gun users to switch to pneumatics by having a similar profile and sighting line, however it was more an approximation rather than a direct replacement. For that they will have to buy a “Dreamair”, and have plenty of money.

The Omer Airbalete/One Air/XII removable grip handle drain fix. Use a small drill and follow the outer edge of the well in the back of the handle. With three extra holes you then have four drains as at the top the trigger push pin already has its own hole. Now at any angle water will drain out with the butt down and you definitely need to get rid of any saltwater trapped in there. Quick to do, it has taken longer to type this up.

While drilling these holes it is best to use a small drill, I used a 3/32" diameter drill bit. Basically you drill one at the bottom and two either side just above the alignment of the fat diameter grip attachment pin, all holes lying on the annular well in the back of the gun. The spigot in the centre of the well is essentially the inlet valve cap, so don't scratch it. The three new holes may come out in not exact alignment due to the angle you hold your power drill on, but don't worry about that as it fingerprints your gun as no two guns will be exactly the same. Originally I only planned to do two holes, but there is enough meat in the bottom of the handle connection so that it will easily take three. Omer should have done this themselves, but then they probably never thought about it.

Just reviewing the Omer detachable handle guns as I now own all three versions picked up brand new for bargain basement, no name band gun money. The design was rather ambitious as they relied on using nothing but the inner barrel tubing from existing pneumatic speargun production. Most brand name spearguns are made by subcontractors, they are not in-house products, although the design parameters are no doubt drawn up by the company if they want something different.

My guess is Omer sketched out the guns, the Airbalete comes first, and having done their sums figured they would not be making enough money if they made them in Italy. They could either abandon the project or find a cheaper alternative. Given the long delay between when the Airbalete was announced and actually ready for sale I suspect this was because they handballed the job to Taiwan and possibly asked them to make the guns as cheap as possible, but without going overboard. Given a free hand the Taiwanese factory began to look at cutting corners and that is how the guns turned out.

I expect that the Airbalete production line was troubled by the need for a unique tank for each gun size as it is not like you can slice a length of tubing to the correct length as hydroformed barrels are made to size. No doubt looking for a way around this the Sporasub One Air evolution meant they could sell the same gun and just chop the triple hollow tube extrusion off to the required length. Another cost saving was these tanks are painted, probably powder coated, they ain't anodized and they have a rough texture as they are not entirely smooth. To provide a point of difference they also used a vacuum barrel muzzle using the STC system, that was a mistake as these use front tied spears, you can go back over half a century when those were used before.

The last and best gun of the set is the Omer Air XII, it has a tubular tank of greater diameter and has dispensed with pretending to be a band gun based on the Omer Cayman handle design.

Another fundamental flaw is the spiky bumps on the piston nose, they allow a gap to be seen through the relief valve ports. If you want to smash up plastic shock absorber anvils then you need a meat tenderiser mallet, Omer put it on the nose off the plastic piston! An admission of "we done wrong" is the spare shock absorber anvil supplied with the guns in later years. What to do about it is take the piston out and flatten it off ensuring that at rest the piston seals don't poke out the front of the end of the inner barrel tube. This last boo boo is handy for letting formerly trapped water out of the space in front of the piston with the gun discharged, but not at the expense of smashing shock absorbers and possibly the piston itself.

By the time I bought the Airbalete, which was the last of the three. nearly everything had gone, so I had to settle for this brown mimetic version rather than the black or the green mimetic. Mimetic finish looks nice, but only the white handle will find your gun again if you drop it cocked and ready to shoot.

Because the guns were sold off to get rid of them many came with the reels and extra handgrips of a more ergonomic type for free, the Airbalete even scored a shaft holder for different sized shafts no less that clipped on front and rear and which is next to useless. Carry a spare shaft sure, but ones of different diameters?

tromic said:

My Mares Cyrano piston also has spiky bumps on the piston nose. I was wondering what was the purpose of that design...

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The bumps on the Mares piston nose don't sit on the anvil, they are in the bore area and are thought to be locating features with respect to the bore alignment. They are well inside the bore however, so they don't really do that.

That is daylight you can see through the gap, this gun is under full charge pressure with the piston pressing against the anvil face and sitting on a ring of bumps. The bumps need to be sanded off or the piston refaced in a lathe to make it flat and spread the contact pressure between piston nose and anvil. Otherwise you will crack the gun's shock absorber anvil after enough shots are put through your gun.

tromic said:

I suppose the bumps on the piston may work different on water barrel guns from that having vacuum barrel..?

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I doubt it, they may be handy to let trapped water run out as vacuum barrel guns have no muzzle relief ports to allow trapped water to escape, but it will still create localized high point loadings that will crack the plastic shock absorber.

One possibility would be a castellated nose on the piston using a hydraulic shock absorber muzzle, by the time the water is squeezed out the piston will have decelerated so much that it could take the impacts even with discontinuities in the contact faces. Any wobble on a hydraulic shock absorber muzzle's piston could have it clip the entrance to the hydraulic displacement section and then big problems.

For many years Omer sold their Tempest pneumatic gun which was essentially a clone of the Sten and made in Italy, possibly emerging from the same factory as all the other Italian pneumatic spearguns. Then it appears they switched sub contractors to one in China or Taiwan as this new version appeared which has Hang Fung Industrial's fingerprints all over it. Looking like their Asso clone you can pick it by that coloured lower grip handle, but they have clipped off that useless lug they added as their own touch on the top of the rear handle.