Hi Murat,
U should add this to Jay Riffe reply :
"At over powered setting or extra plenty of rubbers, the enclosed track do help the thin 9/32 (7mm) and 5/16" (8mm ) shats. For 3/8" ( 9.5mm) it doesn't really help."
"Enclosed track benefits most for guns like MT3 and longer"
This is the reply my friend got. Anyway it does sounds very much like Steve Alexander finding. EC track helps to a certain extend for thin & long shaft if we bad dudes realy over power them, if not open track is just as good.
Anyway if I do get an enclosed track MT, I will let u guys know my finding. You know I am generous with information and photos and so on...bla...bla....bla
but the only problem is, I might not be as a good shot as Jay Riffe. Wha ha ha ha.
Look at his hands, they are so big, damn the guy is huge, he definitely can absorb more recoil than me and thus more accuracy, more ballast...remember
No point speculating on the guns performance untill we try them extensively. Once you experience shooting a 4 x 16mm rubber, it is totaly different from even a 4 x 14mm. Anything shooting a 4 x 16mm rubber or more, deserve extra handling respect, I mean they are so powerful ( including the recoil ).
Our Sultan Sven is one of the lucky guy who has been shooting for so long and have owned so many guns, OK OK, he is 43 years old and have good size wallet to accomodate his hobby. He he he he. The good thing also, he lives in America, home of the upper end spearguns. No import duty, no hassle, only 7.5% sales tax ( I think ). He is the guy who can answer ur questions without speculating cause he has been thru (owned ) what you and I will go thru in the next 10 years.
Here is a brief history of my limited knowledge on spearguns :
I grew up with pneumatic, almost recoiless. I love them but they can't bear the abuse. So I upgraded to JBL Magnum, a 140cm+- with 3 x 12mm rubbers. They advertised 21 feet shooting range, so I thought this is it...... Riffe was not available yet back then in my city, I never even heard of Riffe cause internet was still in it very early days in my country. Since I am not familiar with recoil and band guns, I thought the JBL was a macho gun, after all it gave recoil, unlike my pneumatic.
I seen Canon, AB Miller and some of the Australian guns but since there are no dealers they end up in the garage eventualy. The most popular band guns were the Scubapro composite, 3 x 12mm band. Later comes the JBL Woody Magnum and JBL XHD series. I tried them all. The XHD was quite powerful, in fact very powerful for me because there is no other reference I can compare it with.
One day Riffe was introduced in my city. I took a look at it and my God , the retail price sounds like a highway robbery ( it was only 10-15% above US retail actually ). I thought that why the hell will you pay so much so just teak wood and some stainless steel. You see my country is one of the main producer of Teak wood, naturally I don't find them classy as most other guys, they are top of the line wood but since you see them so often you don't respect them. My Mom renovated the house and I could build a 500 medium sized Riffe from the teak we were using for the house. I was more of a metal guy, wood sounds so pre-historic. So I walked away from Riffe.
One day one of the guy ( Canadian ) in my group got a birthday present from a good friend, a mid-handle Riffe No Ka Oi with reel and Ice Pick. ( where can I find a friend like that
) This is still at the time my currecy was good and strong ( now it went down 400% ). I borrowed the gun and tried to load it, since I am a hip loader, I can't even see tabs to place the wishbone. It took me so much pain and time to load this gun. So I managed only to load 2 rubbers....wha ha ha...what a shame. I didn't know such thing as chest/stomach loading is suitable for mid-handle. So I aim at nothing/water and shot the gun, I noticed the butt was so close to my mouth, so I push my face away real far and WHACK !!!, DAMN the recoil even at two rubbers, I was using a single hand hold cause that is the way to shoot a JBL. HHHmmm, I don't like it. So my Canadian friend load all 3 rubbers and pass it on to another friend. Just like me, this guy shot with a single hand because he is JBL type shooter, guess what happened ? The butt of the gun smashed into his teeth...
. So that was that and no one else in my group bought another Riffe or thinking to get one, after the incident. Also everyone was confused on setting the shooting line, pardon me, it was not as simple as a JBL. We even thought the line wishbone was a sissy because it was not mettalic solid like the JBL. So I guess we don't like to learn new ways and have improvement.
Our hunting area was lousy those days, what to do.....this is where we live. One day somehow we were told that there was an abandoned rig some 60 miles off our Marina.So we tried and the experience was amazing. We lost more shafts than landing the fishes, no cable back then. As usual and being my department, I changed all shooting line to cables. The result was improved catch. So we started eyeing the active oil rigs ( over 50+ ) and made plenty of dives over there ....untill one day the owners/security were waiting for us on the surface ( we were scuba-ing ) and wanted us to follow them to their nearby HQ ( on an island ) for interogation or something. So we said OK, you take your boat we take our boat and meet there............naturaly we full throttle all the way to 33 knots and ran away...Wha ha ha ha. The rig people did not pursue the matter further, cause it they want to find us , it was so easy for them, Jakarta boating circle is very small and my friend's big sportfisherman is so easy to identify. I guess they love to scare us only.
We learnt a lot from those rig dives because we were never exposed to so many fish in such a small perimeter, it was totaly amazing. We also learnt that since it was such a small area we can actualy hear all the JBLs shooting, they were noise makers with the slide rings and mettalic wishbone. The rig underwater sounds like having mini explosions from all our shooting. The main target was the Giant Trevalies, all the way to 30kg. Plenty of red snappers too but none bigger than 5kg. There is always almost one big ugly grouper per rig, I don't know why. It was the best shooting in our entire life. If the snappers came in a school, they get so thick i once just aimed at them, not one of it, shoot and managed to get 2 in one go. It was sometime this easy.
Still the main event was the biggest Giant Trevaly, only 4 species we found on these rigs. Snappers, Grouper, GT and great Barracudas. The GT doesn't allow close shots and they swim up and down like crazy, what do you expect 6 or more scuba divers attacking a small 4 legged rigs. Anyway during these happy times was when we learnt that our JBLs were not a mini-canon we once thought they were. Very few shots managed to pass thru the gill on the other side of the fish, if the GT is big. We then believed that gill shot is the most fatal and will hold spearhead best. A slow learning process.
Our JBls were breaking apart then, XHD plastic muzzles were broken from its own rubber sling hitting home. Non XHD triggers were jamming up, all of the shaft slide ring hitting the shaft stop broke or jammed up. The Woody Magnum trigger pins were breaking the plastic pistol grip. Only my friends Riffe No Ka Oi was doing well, we can't even hear him shoot. He kept puching thru the GT gills without problem. That was when we decided we must buy the Riffe, it will not only improve the catch but it is cheaper to maintain in the long run and much more silent too, it was proven.
Anyway I wish to tell you more of this story but I just realized that my long post is crowding the DB forum and it might not benefit everyone so I need to stop here. Unless the further story is interesting for many......I need to sign out now.
IYA
