"Sea Hunter" pneumatic speargun

[popgun pete]

The "Sea Hunter" pneumatic speargun was sold in the West for a short time, I remember reading a small item on it in the "New Products" section of a British dive magazine, either "Underwater World" or its immediate successor "Diver", which acquired "Underwater World" in the early eighties (March 1982). There was a small photo of the gun in black and white and not much else about it except that the expected retail price would be around US$1,000! That was a stratospheric figure for those days and seemed incomprehensible for any speargun.

Some decades later when I had completely forgotten about it a forlorn example appeared on eBay. Fortunately no one knew what it was so I acquired it for a relatively modest price. Unlike collectors who just want to acquire spearguns like swap cards I was more interested in tearing it apart and seeing what was inside. Then armed with this information I set about finding out who made it and where. The answer was revealed when my photographic report was posted on a Russian web-site, you can see it here at:

http://www.fishgun-master.ho.com.ua/kunstcamera/sea_hunter.htm

The speargun's designer was revealed to be Viktor Doroganich, a Russian who is a greatly respected engineer, diver and a very prominent person on the Russian diving scene. His gun is/was manufactured by the best equipment then available in Russia, the military-industrial complex, or so I have deduced from reading the Russian spearfishing forums. What I had not thought about when taking the gun apart was that it was made of anything else but aluminium, stainless steel and brass. What I have since discovered, by comparing the grey coloured parts with known titanium objects, is that the gun is in fact made of titanium, something that I did not know when I wrote my report.

Hence the "Sea Hunter" is a heavy speargun and a definite non-floater at this model length, but it just shows what you can do without moulded plastic structural parts if you manufacture everything in-house and have the resources to do so.

 

[tromic]

Very nice, Peter.

Did you tray it in the sea? Was the performance comparable to present day guns?

Regards, Tomislav

 

[foxfish]

Cool, it actually looks like a piece of modern fire arm technology, something that could shoot down a jet fighter!!

 

[popgun pete]

I have never fired this "Sea Hunter" speargun. It arrived here in a non-working condition and as I had not seen anything like it before it took me a while to figure out how to disassemble it. Once I took the muzzle off and pulled the piston out I could see the ball system down the far end of the inner barrel (I had read about using ball sears in my speargun patent research), so then I knew how to take it apart, you have to dismantle it from the rear end and pull the rear body tube section off the inner barrel.

The execution is first class in terms of machining standards and the materials used could not be bettered (except for the clear soft packing's and "O" rings which are good rather than top notch), but it is an expensive way to make a speargun. The three ball system has been used before, Mares even tried it, although I do not know if their gun ever reached production. The ball system tends to throttle the internal air flow into the inner barrel, thus limiting the power of guns using this arrangement. Doroganich got around that problem by making the ball system and its retaining cage much larger than earlier guns had used and therefore gave himself some extra space to play with in order to channel air from the outer reservoir into the inner barrel.

The single "O" ring on the one-piece nylon piston was completely shredded. I found pieces of it everywhere inside the gun, it was sort of turned inside out like a sausage skin and only a wispy circular fragment was still sitting on the piston body. I can guess how that happened, the last owner before the collector who owned it must have taken it into his head to shoot the gun on land. Flying down the inner barrel without water inside it the friction instantly tore the piston's "O" ring seal to shreds and the spear and a blast of oily air issued from the gun. That would have been its last ever shot as no one would have known how to fix it in the West, or even bother to look at it. No doubt the US-based collector picked it up cheap because the gun had quit working and he just had it as a curiosity to look at. Note that the nose cone is also missing, you can see where it was once glued in place.

The collector must have since passed on as his dive gear collection, which took six months or more to sell, was disposed of on eBay by a seller specialising in auctioning off deceased estate dive equipment. Speargun collectors fell on the vintage speargun horde like seagulls squawking at the local garbage tip when a new truckload of trash arrives. Fortunately during the ensuing bidding frenzy I managed to grab the gun, it evidently was deemed by many buyers to be too modern looking to be a vintage speargun.

My analysis of the gun is that it is not a high power shooter, it has been designed primarily for reliability and ease of loading, you have to remember what it would be competing with back home in the USSR to appreciate why this would be seen as a big advantage! The gun was also built for the ruling elites, you also have to appreciate that the USSR was a Command Economy, not a Market Economy, so advertising and attracting buyers at random would not be as important as who you knew and what influence you had to obtain such a weapon. Or for that matter any underwater weapon, the Soviets were completely starved of quality production speargun models, hence some opted to build their own as rationing of scarce State factory production models meant that some people would never be able to own a speargun no matter how much they wanted to buy one.

It took me a long time to figure out why Doroganich made the gun this way, the apparent simplicity hides a number of complex design features. The piston is designed for stabilised flight within the inner barrel, that taper on the piston body is there for a reason, as is the single piston seal, they all maximise the efficiency of the gun in reducing frictional losses in the barrel to the lowest level possible. The big capacity air reservoir gives the gun a low compression ratio which maximises the power output for a given chamber pressure, but that pressure must be relatively low or the force on the piston would snap the tail off at the curved annulus where the balls sit, the cross-section of the piston neck is small there, particularly with the hole in the tail of the piston running right under where the balls sit. There is also a system of jets in the short nylon piston that slides into place after the main piston leaves, its primary function is to catch the balls and stop them rolling around inside the inner barrel once the gun is fired. There are probably a whole bunch of air flow dynamics that I can only guess at, plus hydro-flow and pressure wave riding in the water filled barrel. I am no rocket scientist, but apparently Doroganich is, he works on weapons systems, in particular missiles!

I have had the "Sea Hunter" speargun in pieces for a few years now, but have recently got it back together again, now all I have to do is find an "O" ring for the piston. I replaced some of the other seals with black rubber "O" rings after measuring up the dimensions of where they sat in the gun, but the piston "O" ring is an unusual size judging by the groove cut in the piston to accommodate it.

One reason I posted this thread was to see if anyone recalls that small article in the British diving magazine, I misplaced my own copy many years ago. I am not absolutely sure that it is the same gun, but I am very sure that it was called a "Sea Hunter".

My thoughts are that this gun would be more at home in a lake shooting medium-sized fish in poor visibility, but for sure it could withstand saltwater. For ocean use I think that the gun has a flaw, but not one that you would immediately think of, I will elaborate on this at a later time as it is now after midnight here. Time to hit the sack!

 

[foxfish]

Spaniard is very often knowledgeable about this sort of thing, i will send him a pm for you to see if he has any memory of the magazine.

 

[popgun pete]

Thanks foxfish, that will confirm the early eighties date for the "Sea Hunter" speargun. I assume that the "Sea Hunter" version was designed for export as why put an English language name on a Russian speargun? In the West it would have faced strong competition from the established Italian pneumatics like the "Sten" family and the mid-handle "Titan" models, something which it lacked at home as "factory" guns tended to be indifferently made and Soviet-era buyers just took what they could get their hands on. However the gun has since been available in Russia as a Doroganich speargun and as we can see from the larger version on the Ukrainian web-site there are different model lengths available. This long gun will be a high power shooter by virtue of the greater propulsion distance inside such a long inner barrel, but think of all that titanium tubing! I am posting that gun photo here for those who have not looked at the Ukrainian web-site, the gun has a strong, almost sculptural appearance. Note the attempt to take some weight out of it by ribbing of the central body section and a few holes bored through the handle frame to remove material.

Now to that flaw I referred to earlier. Tapered plastic piston bodies have the potential to wedge any contaminants against the inner barrel wall. In a river or lake you have silts that are more likely to be worn smooth, in fact I dug a small brown coloured micro-pebble out of the tapered body section of the Sea Hunter's piston, it looked like a small burn mark in the plastic, it was so tiny that I could only see it clearly with a jeweller's eye-piece or loup. If you have sharper particles like quartz type beach sand and they embed in your plastic piston then you will have a form of sandpaper scrubbing away at your inner barrel every time you load and fire your gun. The Sea Hunter's stainless steel inner barrel will be more resistant to scratching, but will not be impervious to it. Its tapered piston could be a liability for inner barrel scratching in sandy ocean environments.

An aluminium barrel will score badly once the sand particles scratch through the anodised coating that is slightly harder than the parent aluminium, then you will get air leaks in the inner barrel which gradually depressurise your gun. Nearly all Italian pneumatic spearguns have aluminium inner and outer barrels, but they are saved from sand ingestion by being floaters unless you drop a loaded gun to the bottom. The "Sea Hunter" being made of titanium is heavy, plus there is that keel mounted angular handle frame which is no lightweight, so it will go straight to the bottom whether it is charged or discharged. The Italian nylon pistons are essentially cylinders which stops them from wobbling in the inner barrel and leave little side clearance for particles to get past the front face of the piston which acts as a wiper pushing particles along in front of it. The downside of such pistons is that they have the potential for more barrel wall contact and hence more friction.

The pressure wave in the water moving along in front of the advancing piston in a flooded inner barrel should sweep foreign particles out of the gun before they can do any harm, but you cannot rely on it getting rid of all of them. I have little experience of long term wear effects with stainless steel inner barrels, so it may not be a problem even with the type of beach sands here, but if it did prove to be a problem who wants to go looking for a replacement inner barrel? Usually it is cheaper to buy another gun of the same type as spare parts are usually sold at outrageous prices, plus few shops are willing to stock spare parts beyond a few small items such as spare tips and line slide parts, sometimes not even that!

 

[popgun pete]

"Sea Hunter" pneumatic speargun is now correctly reassembled, but still lacking "O" ring of suitable size for hand pump, so I am not able to pressurise the gun yet. Every gun designer makes a hand pump with a different sized connection to the gun, so instead of one universal hand pump for your pneumatic spearguns you may need six or more of them!

Flopper on spear tip sits at oblique angle and is not flush with the shaft, yet has two relief vents in it to minimise drag from excess cavitation forming in the space behind it, which seems a curious design choice. I think this gun is not designed for long shaft flight, but for punching holes in large specimens lying in wait on the bottom when unfortunately for them the diver suddenly appears. No shooting line rigging system is evident, nor any indication of where one was ever fitted, yet gun has a line slide (which must be used to align the spear at the muzzle and thus the progress of the tapered body piston in the inner barrel).

 

[popgun pete]

While reviewing my past posts, now that I have hit my 5 MB attachment limit (yet again!), I happened on this past "Sea Hunter" thread. Rather than jettison these images I thought that an update would be of interest as Victor Doroganich now has his guns showing on his own web-site. http://www.doroganich.ru/

These latest Doroganich guns are aluminum construction and come in 50, 60 and 80 cm versions. The overall appearance is largely unchanged, but the guns now have a sleeker, modern look. The all-plastic one-piece piston in the earlier "Sea Hunter" is now replaced by a plastic one with a titanium "mushroom" tail which will be much stronger. I had thought that the gun's operating pressure was previously limited by the strength of the annular grooved plastic piston tail where the three locking balls sat with the gun cocked (unofficial figures quoted this pressure as being only 9 to 11 Bar), but now the operating pressure is listed as extending up to 50 Bar! Also excess metal has been trimmed out of the trigger finger guard compared to the very thick unit seen on the "Sea Hunter" and a trigger operated line release finger is now incorporated in the slot which had been left empty on my gun. Except for immunity from corrosion there is no real need for titanium in a speargun body, but it makes sense to use titanium in the piston tail and maybe the muzzle because there you can utilize its greater strength without having to resort to using heavier stainless steel instead.

There does not appear to be any user reviews posted on the site yet, so I assume the web pages are relatively new. Check out the 80 cm model here http://www.doroganich.ru/index.php?page=shop.product_details&flypage=flypage.tpl&product_id=343&category_id=31&option=com_virtuemart&Itemid=60.

 

[popgun pete]

On checking back I see that I removed the photos, so here they are in a single composite image. The gun is back in pieces again as I had to measure some internal parts when I received a query about them. If it looks a grey colour then it is titanium, even the pump rod and handle of the hand pump (the pump rod can be used as a spear, it has identical machining to the spears)!

 

[popgun pete]

Here is what the guns look like today. These are 80 cm models, the titanium gun has a titanium reel, the other model is the aluminium version (longest version in aluminium). The longest spearguns offered are 130 cm models in titanium.

 

[popgun pete]

If you want to own one of these very high quality guns and thus demonstrate your appreciation of excellence in manufacturing and design by owning something that few other people ever get to see, much less have a chance to shoot, then this is the gun to buy.

The web-site on which to make an initial contact is here: http://168386.ru.all.biz/en

Then you will be advised, after an expert technical assessment of your specific hunting requirements in terms of the prey, operating conditions and nature of the underwater terrain, which of the "Doroganich" models is best suited to your needs.

Prepare to spend a lot of money as the highest quality always merits a premium price, especially if you want the full titanium model to impress your friends, but check first if you want a "floater", as titanium is a lot heavier than aluminium.

 

[popgun pete]

I have modified a diagram of the "Sea Hunter" muzzle and piston that I drew up some years ago in order to show their interaction. It now occurs to me that a more prosaic reason for the taper on the piston is to stop it jamming at full travel in the muzzle when the piston is finally halted.

 

[popgun pete]

The distinctive orange grip handle and grey titanium handle frame and trigger assembly has disappeared from where I had stored it separately from the rest of the gun. Not noticed at the time, it was evidently taken in a burglary a few years back and only when I went to retrieve it recently from its shelf in a cupboard did I realize that it had gone. I cannot imagine why it was taken as it is totally useless for anything else and would have no value beyond the scrap value. If anyone sights it, which is going to be highly unlikely, then please let me know.

 

[popgun pete]

I recovered the grip handle, so the "Sea Hunter" is back in one piece again!

 

[popgun pete]

The "Sea Hunter" review where the gun's origins were established http://www.fishgun-master.ho.com.ua/kunstcamera/sea_hunter.htm

 

[popgun pete]

I tried to obtain the missing nose cone (actually a hollow .titanium shroud) and a newer, revised piston from Viktor Doroganich, inventor and builder of the “Sea Hunter” gun. Unfortunately nothing ever appeared as spearguns can be difficult to get out of Russia if the "wrong person" (afraid of making an error and losing his/her job) puts the “brakes” on your speargun package. As speargun exports out of RUSSIA grow this situation should change, sooner or later, hopefully sooner!

 

[popgun pete]

Dimensions of the "Sea Hunter" pneumatic speargun. Doroganich photos from the website https://168386-ru.all.biz/en/

 

[popgun pete]

More dimensions

 

[popgun pete]

A similar 3 ball sear gun is made by Alpinasub according to a message I received. The gun is called the "DELPHIN".
http://www.alpinasub.com/

 

[popgun pete]

Other guns offered are of the forward latching type which require a notch in the front end of the spear unless a friction sear is being used in which case the shaft is left bare.