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Pelengas Pneumovacuum speargun

Thread Status: Hello , There was no answer in this thread for more than 60 days.
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Thanks so much for these, Pete!
Pretty much as I expected but was good to see how they clamped the paddle assembly onto the barrel itself. But no spring?
 
Recently I noticed some oil leaking out of my Pelengas "Magnum 70" which I had depressurized until the warmer weather arrives. Figuring that the gun, which at that time was laying on its side, was only leaking as the seals were not under any pressure, I grabbed the hand pump and put 50 pump strokes into it. I wiped the oil off and placed the gun in a tub of water to check for leaks and there were none as can be seen in this photo. Note that a handy way to check for slow leaks is to add a few drops of detergent to the water, after the gun is already in the tub of water, and then watch for a patch of froth to develop on the surface. This can be checked periodically as you don't really need to hang around watching it because the build-up of micro-bubbles can often be very slow.
 
In addition to the maintenance mentioned in the "Pelengas" handbook it is advisable to pump the inner barrel out with freshwater after a dive. The stainless steel inner barrel tube can be corroded by saltwater droplets left in it at the muzzle end and in order to avoid this happening you can use the same procedure described for the "Taimen". Basically remove the vacuum seal from the muzzle, replace the front plastic nut without the seal and then pump the piston up and down with the shaft while pouring freshwater down into the muzzle. About three or four strokes should do it, then leave everything to dry off before reassembling the muzzle with a few drops of oil as a lubricant.
 
I revisited their website and see a rear handle "Magnum 110" for US$280. On the second video, which I have not watched right through yet as I had another that I had to view first on spearfishing in Southern California, the guy is holding a Pelengas gun with what looks like "Zelinka" written on the side in orange letters. I have not found anything else about it elsewhere, but putting the Zelinka operating system in their gun does not make much sense. Maybe that is not what is says, so I will have to watch the video.

Well it is a Zelinka operating system as the video shows the inner works on a cutaway example of the gun. The front bulkhead screws into the tank tube as the inner barrel, which moves for the shot, does not hold the gun together as it does in a normal gun. That adds to the weight of the gun, but it now means the gun uses a releasing valve to shoot by controlling airflow rather than a catch holding a piston. Now the catch holds the inner barrel instead and pulling the trigger lets the inner barrel slide forwards which opens the valve at the rear of the gun and admits air from the tank into the inner barrel. If the gun still floats after the shot then it will be good, but that I don't know yet. The Zelinka spearguns have a good following in Russia and the Ukraine, so it looks like Pelengas have decided to provide a product to meet that demand.
 
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Interestingly the new Pelengas "Zelinka" system gun, which has a blue striped section on the rear of the black grip handle rather than an orange stripe, pumps up from the rear end with the usual type of separate hand pump. Zelinka system guns often use their inner barrel tube as the hand pump with the air going into the air tank via a separate one-way valve located behind the releasing valve. The advantage of releasing valve guns is you can vary gun power by throttling the releasing valve opening, through mechanical restrictions on the allowable valve movement, and the inner barrel sliding piston is very simple as it has no metal tail. Thus the piston can weigh next to nothing and may only have one seal. The disadvantage is more parts are required in the gun and it will be more expensive to make, especially as the tank tube has to be thicker in wall section to take screw threads.

Not always however, as GSD achieved a releasing valve gun held together with the outer tank by using a rolled over flange at the nose of the thin wall tank that was anchored by the plastic bulkhead, or collar directly molded onto the front end of the inner barrel tube and four expanding metal dogs that engaged four circumferentially spaced slots in the rear end of the alloy tank. That allowed their releasing valve gun, the "Katiuscia", to be light enough to float like a cork after the shot, but it must have cost them a fortune to make it as the parts list for the gun seemingly rolled on forever.
 
Looks like "Pelengas" is a Russian company after all, contrary to what we had been told earlier.
 
Encouraging bad habits as here the sear tooth is holding as the piston is revolved by the spear, but weighted from the tip and using a rod that is somehow fastened to the piston there is no lateral movement (tilt) of the rod so it decreases the possibility of the piston's mushroom tail "walking" off the sear tooth. An alternating stick, slide, stick vibration or chattering is what unhooks the piston if you turn the shaft with the gun cocked, but you can get away with it at times. Better to twist the shaft by simultaneously pressing on the loading bar to unload the sear tooth slightly. Note that in the Zelinka mechanism version of the Pelengas that you can twist the cocked shaft around with impunity as there is no sear tooth and no piston tail. Tahitian shafts with integral tips and a single flopper may need constant alignment for reproducible shots, but it depends on how far you are shooting as the closer the shot then you don't need to do it.
 
The "Pelengas 70+" pneumovacuum speargun does float like a cork just as I thought it would, in fact it floats on its side when discharged. The pressure tank is 32 mm OD at the rear, but hydroformed to be somewhat fatter at the front end with bulging to the sides and underneath, hence the gun's buoyancy, although the gun in air feels light to hold. The grip handle must also be a buoyancy element as I thought it might hang downwards, but it floats, so you can see the orange grip section when looking at the gun from the surface. Shooting is quiet and with no apparent toss as your hand grip is the same distance down from the shooting axis as it is with a "Sten", even though the gun is a mid-handle. Due to the Tahitian tipped shaft I had to spare some lucky potential victims as I knew that under the sandy patches they were lying in ambush on were many rocks which I have blasted before, but not so lucky were ones lying on deeper sand. The area I was spearing in I know like the back of my hand, so I was cruising around to known productive spots. No long range shots attempted as mid-handle guns are easy to miss with until you get your eye in. The gun was pressurized conservatively by feel as I never count the pump strokes unless there is a danger of overdoing it, such as with the small volume "Taimen".

I will have to get a soft carry bag for the "Pelengas" as the mid-handle might not like being grilled by the strong sun and the rubberized lower grip material used may be formulated for its homeland, not here. For now I just wrapped it up in a beach towel when not in the water until it came time to carry it down and back. I will buy a threaded tip spear for it as while Mares shafts fit the gun, all my Mares shafts are non-stainless and their surface finish may trash the vacuum seal. I have rarely used integral tip shafts as they don't last long when slammed into a rock and repeated sharpening whittles the ends down (in that hunting environment that is, open water is a different story).
 
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Although I did not watch the Moscow Dive Show video right through as sections where there were just talking heads told me nothing, because I don't speak Russian, I did capture some images that were very informative when features of each gun were being discussed. Two guns were sectioned to see what was inside, the blue striped rear grip handle was the "Zelinka" version, but I am not sure what the second orange striped gun was, although at first I thought it was another "Zelinka". Evidently it had a power regulator in the rear which you twisted around to vary a throttle system, but it also had a pull rod which you don't usually see in a "Zelinka" system gun.

Anyway here are the images, some of which I have speculatively annotated.
 
And here are photos of the second gun which has the usual orange stripe on the rear handle, but has a revolving rear cap which I assume is a power regulator or "power dial". Such systems use revolving ports to throttle the shot, in fact this one reminds me of my magnetic power regulator proposal for the "Taimen" with what looks like a multi-ported disc. After about halfway through the 23 minute video I figured that I had seen enough, but more revelations may have followed which I have not seen.
 
I created a new thread on www.apox.ru for this "Zelinka" version of the "Pelengas" with just a few words and no images, figuring that the forum would be abuzz about a new gun. However nothing had been discussed there either before that posting or since that I could see, so there must be some "undercurrent" of disapproval running there that I am unaware of. Here is a photo of the screw-in front bulkhead on the "Zelinka" version of the gun, the presenter was moving the gun around so much that I could only get this slightly blurry image when I hit the pause button on the video player.
 
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My thread on www.apox.ru has sprouted an extra word in the title as it now shows up as Ружьё PELENGAS "ZELINKA"(Украина).
The word in brackets is Ukraine, which I did not put there. I see some other thread titles have had this addition made and on one such thread the tone is distinctly hostile, hence not much will be forthcoming from the participants in that forum I expect.
 
Finally got a technical response on the www.apox.ru forum that indicated the power regulator shown is indeed a magnetic coupling unit, the small silvery disc in the black plastic rotating component is a magnet. The rear outer sleeve must also be plastic, it is cut away on the side we are looking from, but the other side must be intact and contains another magnet. The original proposal contained magnets on both sides of the ported disc or rotor.

A later version used balls to provide the sealing action, or ball segments, controlled by the magnetic coupled rotor. Contaminants can impede the rotor's movement, so the magnetic coupling "switch" has to be able to free the rotor by not just simply turning it on the gun's longitudinal axis.
 
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Pelengas Store is back on eBay, now offering titanium slider for 7 mm diameter shafts.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Titanium-Sl...058500?hash=item1ec095c084:g:4xUAAOSw8w1X9jGs
Also other items such as spearguns and reels are on offer. The "Magnum" versions have the metal trigger and line release and a longer muzzle which now holds three polyurethane washers instead of two. I thought that the number was already three, but never checked to be sure. Also a revised piston has conical nose rather than flat one that better impacts the polyurethane shock absorber (without breaking as had occurred earlier?).
 
If you want to see the difference between the original and later "Magnum" version of the "Pelengas" then take a look at this thread: http://apox.ru/forum/topic/13499-ruzhe-pelengas-magnumukraina/

Side by side photographs compare the components that have been changed. Practical experience gained in using the guns will have been the impetus to make many of the changes, although the earlier forms of the gun still seem to be available. So many models in a few short years make other manufacturers look lazy as we wait maybe a decade or more to see a new gun from them. However if a gun does all that is required, then maybe there is no need to change it. Sometimes in the rush to get a new gun into the market a "Beta test" version is released, only the manufacturer does not know that until the complaints start flooding in! Then revised parts are hurriedly dispatched, or the gun is relaunched as yet another model if the earlier gun has already earned a bad reputation. In the past this did not happen as a gun may spend years being evaluated and debugged before the public could purchase it.
 
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