Pelengas Pneumovacuum speargun

I was curious about the "Pelengas" pneumovacuum speargun and found these interesting pages on it.

http://www.3-dm.ru/content/view/291/39/

http://divers.by/index.php/articles/10/1716

There are many Russian forum debates on this speargun, some extend for 50 pages (and more!), but they tend to get side-tracked with arguments, so I suggest looking at this info first to see what the design is all about.

Possibly the gun is still a work in progress as the manufacturing bugs are being sorted out.

Evidently not enough hits for search engines to find it, but here is the web-site for the gun: http://www.pelengas.com/

I wish that I had found it earlier rather than wade through a lot of posts elsewhere! Obvious name, I should have looked for that first.

The ocean can be a dangerous place for hunters!

The "Pelengas" gun looks to be of a standard rear handle layout with a tipping sear tooth lever upended by a trigger-operated short transmission pin, but it is constructed in the manner of Russian and Ukrainian guns where the handle's upper section is a tubular socket type that fits onto the outer tank tube which runs virtually the full length of the gun. A 12 mm inner diameter stainless steel barrel holds the gun together and the end cap or rear bulkhead traps the hydroformed tank between it and the front bulkhead which in turn is held by the muzzle. Interestingly the front line wrap hook is integral with the front bulkhead, so you can turn it to left or right to line up with the optional magnetic line release depending on which side of the gun you have that magnetic line release oriented to. The bulkhead is twisted around with all air pressure removed from the gun, otherwise it would be loaded up against the muzzle and not able to be turned.

It appears that the plastic piston with metal mushroom tail slams into a couple of polyurethane bushes which act as anvil and shock absorber sleeve in the muzzle. The harder one is the anvil face, the softer one sits in front of it and dissipates the impact. Without a rigid anvil face the piston may deflect slightly as it hits, so maybe the broken pistons reported have something to do with this aspect. There seem to be a number of criticisms of the gun on the Russian forums, but there are various opinions and strongly held views at work there which may distort the true picture for the rest of us.

The "Pelengas" gun seems to follow the "Taimen" pneumovacuum gun in a number of respects, particularly the polyurethane stop spear tails and the hydraulic damper line sides matched with a rubber nozzle type vacuum barrel sealing system, however it is a larger bodied gun compared to the diminutive proportions of the "Taimen". That bulged sides and bottom hydroformed outer tank increases the gun's water displacement, so the metal components did not have to be reduced in mass as much as they have been on the "Taimen" in order for the gun to float after the shot. So a different design philosophy at work.

The instructions on the web-site contain numbered references to parts as if referring to a numbered schematic, but there does not appear to be one shown there.

Well I have had a good look at the existing photos on the web-site and read all the text. Where the "Pelengas" differs from guns that we are used to seeing is in the construction details. The rear bulkhead is essentially a machined and profiled disk with an integral sleeve section of smaller diameter projecting forwards that the inner barrel fits into as a socket attachment. The inner barrel does not screw into the rear bulkhead, instead it is held in place by a transverse pin passing through them both (a similar attachment is used in the "RPB-1"). The inlet valve sits in the rear end of the inner barrel behind another transverse pin which retains its biasing coil spring and is a rubber or some other compliant material in the form of a disk that replaces a valve stem. You push a blunt pin through a small hole in the rear end to displace this disk and let air out of the gun, the disk is nipped away on the sides with crescent cutouts so that air can flow past it easier as it moves away from the flat seat in the inner rear of the bulkhead. Anyone who has a "Seabear" (or "Orion"/"RP") AK model will recognize this type of inlet valve, but there the rubber valve disk has no side cutouts (MAK models do have a metal valve stem, but in a completely different rear bulkhead that has a "power dial").

Only the front end of the inner barrel has a screw thread that the muzzle attaches to, so you assemble the rear bulkhead on the inner barrel and then push the tank over it and then add the front bulkhead which is held in place by the threaded connection to the muzzle. There appear to be two forms of muzzle, a short version in metal with 6 relief ports for a wet barrel gun and a much longer muzzle in a cylindrical form with a removable plastic nose piece that contains the actual vacuum sealing cuff for "dry" barrel operation. As you can unscrew the nose piece with the gun still under pressure the cylindrical muzzle must contain an internal diameter restriction which the damper or shock absorber sleeves (two polyurethane bushes, innermost harder, outermost soft) are pressed against by uncocked gun pressure forcing the piston onto them and another restriction which keeps the damper sleeves in the muzzle and acting from their rear. I expect that the muzzle is constructed of three pieces, a plastic nose piece or "cup", a knurled outer periphery joining section that traps the damper sleeves in the muzzle body and the cylindrical muzzle body itself that screws onto front end of the inner barrel. Alternatively the damper sleeves press in from the rear of the muzzle body which would eliminate any seals in the muzzle body at any threaded circumferential joint, in which case the metal muzzle body is one-piece, but relies on the damper sleeves being held in place by being a tight fit. To absorb an impact the damper sleeves ideally need somewhere to expand as they deform (well the softer sleeve anyway) and change their shape momentarily, but those details are unknown.

What holds the grip handle in place on the tank's cylindrical rear section and indexes it at the correct orientation I also do not know, but it has to line up with any access hole through the tank wall that the trigger transmission pin passes through that is used to tip the sear lever over to fire the gun. The parts that this small diameter transmission pin (2 mm diameter?) pass through look very similar to their counterparts in the Mares "Cyrano", but are made from non-plated brass or bronze. Rather than a biasing vertical coil spring pushing down on the rear end of the sear lever a spring is provided by a ring form spring encircling the inner barrel tube that lifts the front end of the sear lever instead.

The black with rear orange strip highlight grip handle appears to be of a larger size than usual, but the important hand span dimensions are much the same as the grip is not overly raked in terms of its angle to the longitudinal axis of the barrel.

The "Pelengas" gun costs about the same as a "Taimen" if you don't include the reel and currently is available as a "55 +" and a "45" model with longer barrel guns under development. Now all we need is someone here to buy one!

A 100 cm model of the gun and some of its victims are shown here: http://www.abirvalg.net/2562-podvodnoe-ruzhe-pelengas-100.html

Some very interesting observations here comparing the "Pelengas 55+" gun with a Mares "Cyrano Evo 55" (first that I have heard of a smaller one of those, it seems to have a cylindrical tank like the 70 cm version) http://apox.ru/forum/topic/11957-ruzhe-pelengas-pelengas/page__st__1100. Facts now replace earlier arguments and prejudices as the thread settles down to analysis based on first-hand observations. The significance of the plus (+) sign in the Pelengas model designation will become apparent as you read the post (#1103, page 56) with all the images, which are very good.

To see the photo attachments examining the various close-up details of both guns you will need to be a member of that forum. It is easy to join as the on-line translator will assist, you just need to wait as it kicks in during the various steps of the process which seems to be universal amongst on-line forums.

Photos mentioned above are now moved to their own thread: http://apox.ru/forum/topic/12597-sravnenie-pelengas-55-i-mares-cyrano-evo-55/.

Unfortunately squabbles and arguments still continue on the web-site, so actual info is sparsely spread amongst the "serve and return" process as a game of some sorts continues. Fortunately we have an excellent moderator here and our participants are more interested in facts rather than opinions.

One thing to note is the "Pelengas" gun now has a new side-mounted line release, whereas in the above photos it has one operating from the trigger's lower tip and pivoting in the trigger finger guard frame. Here is a composite photo of the revised handle which has been assembled from the ones shown on the aforementioned web-site.

This diagram shows what I was trying to find out about the "Pelengas" speargun muzzle's shock absorption system. Unlike most pneumatic spearguns there is not a rigid shock absorber body that restricts how the damper or shock absorber sleeves expand and contact as loads are applied and removed from the shock absorber anvil face. What spurred this line of thought was that the Russian forum threads at one time complained about high initial loading effort to get the piston moving during muzzle loading and also reports of cracked pistons. Now on Italian pneumatic guns a high initial loading effort is not uncommon if the gun has not been used for some time, the pistons seem to "stick" in the muzzle and are unwilling to budge at first, but once they move they are OK and subsequent reloads don't display this problem. As most of my regular user Italian pneumatic guns have metal pistons I cannot say the same for the plastic piston guns as I don't use them enough and most of them are short, so no problem there as you can exert loading effort more easily on a shorter gun than a longer one with the rear handle resting on your thigh.

I never received an answer on www.apox.ru as either no one commenting had a "Pelengas" gun, or if they did, then they never checked their guns to find out. Another possibility is that those problems have been resolved and forum participants are simply arguing the toss about what is now past history. In fact arguments account for a "Pelengas" gun thread now 57 pages long, it was even longer, but the moderator finally redirected and chopped some of the more inflammatory posts.

Well it is an observation for which I am trying to find out whether it is a real problem or not, but discussions on the Russian forum are side-tracked at every turn and I don't know anyone who owns one of these guns.

The producers of the "Pelengas" speargun now have a rear biased, mid-handle version of their gun. The trigger mechanism is similar to the one used in the old Nemrod "Silver Series" guns where the trigger transmission pin pushes an internal paddle that pivots to pull a rod connected to the rear mounted sear lever. The inlet valve is now a ball valve type. You can read about the new version of the gun here:
http://apox.ru/forum/topic/12606-pelengas-70-so-smeshennoi-rukojatkoi/

Updated web page now shows more models of the "Pelengas" gun and variations to the tank and grip handles on longer guns, even though the page still has the same name as before.
http://pelengas.com/ruzhe-pelengas-55

Someone in the Ukraine is selling brand new "Pelengas" pneumovacuum spearguns on eBay as while looking for something else a whole bunch of them came up. While at times I have mentioned them as a Russian gun, they may come from the Ukraine, or maybe there is just a large distributor there. Guns are selling Worldwide, which is interesting considering how hard it used to be to get a speargun out of the Ukraine.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Pelengas-70...60ce5f0&pid=100005&rk=5&rkt=6&sd=161778095728

Diving Gecko said:

The Ebay shop is legit, it's just another outlet from the company itself. If you PM the shop, you will end up talking to the Pelengas folks.

Yup, Ukrainian.

Click to expand...

Well I guess that explains some of the NIH (not invented here) flavour of the Russian forums when criticism seemed to flow from every angle and spread out over dozens of pages before anything useful could be gleaned.

Now here is a gun of a useful size for those desiring to hunt the big ones, the "Pelengas 140+". I did not see this gun on their web-site, but it is being sold on eBay.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Pelengas-14...n-for-Scuba-Diving-Spearfishing-/161936303059

All that remains is your ability to load it, which is something that I could not do as this monster is too long for me. I don't like extension loaders, but if you have mastered them then this gun is right up your alley!