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"Seabear" operating pressure

Thread Status: Hello , There was no answer in this thread for more than 60 days.
It can take a long time to get an up-to-date response or contact with relevant users.
You were right....if you can see by the picture there were three of those piston looking things in the barrel. So, how many should there be and where should I pack them with grease, etc.? Also, that wooden piece is the furthest thing to the back of the gun correct? Do you see the spear retainer gasket at all from the parts there in the picture?
 

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YIKES! That's it ... only one goes in the gun. The little wooden looking thing goes in first then the piston. It looks like none of your pistons have a spear retainer gasket on the front. That little cone shaped nipple is where you have to jam the gasket on (not the easiest move in the world).

The depression between the o-rings is where you pack the grease. As for other lubrication, I usually give a good squirt of silicone oil in the rear air chamber to make sure that everything is lubricated and protected from any moisture you may pump in there. Of course, you can use a heavy spray of silicone or some other light oil but I am limited on the space that I can get that stuff on so go with the more expensive liquid.

The top picture looks like your most recent one and that gunk on the front appears to be residual gasket material from dry firing. NEVER shoot the gun out of water and NEVER pull the trigger with the shaft removed. The gun requires water to lubricate as the shaft is expelled and to provide a little more back pressure. Without the shaft, the piston screams down the barrel and will toast the little plastic front piece and can seriously damage the piston and muzzle. And I don't have any more muzzles!
 
Sounds good. I already put an order in through you for a gasket along with the seal kit and a manual. One more quick question.....Under the pressure camp all I see is a black disc with a hole in the middle of it. When I pump air into the chamber I assume the air will release through that little hole so am I missing something there as well? I understand that dry firing, I never have had the gun working so the guy that gave it to me must have been dry firing it or something....Thanks so much for all the help.
 
Where you screw in the pump, that little disc is nothing more than a gasket to seal between the cone butt and pump. Air goes in the hole and pushes through the little rubber plate and spring that is mounted on the back of the barrel inside. Be careful not to loose those as I don't have any more. The rubber plate is the same size as the old US Divers second stage rubber discs or you can just cut one out of rubber gasket material.

I will contact you by email about your order ... my shopping cart software is fritzing out lately and leaves things off.
 
That makes me a little worried because I do not see a rubber plate or a spring on the inside of the barrel. I attached a couple pictures showing what the inside of the barrel of mine has, maybe I am misunderstanding you but as far as I can tell I don't have anything like that.
 

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Uh oh. That's bad news. There is a little "cup" that sits in the end of that barrel and it houses a spring, valve seat and the rubber disc. When unscrewing the back off the gun, you should have heard it fall out into the air chamber or on to the workbench. If not, you are in trouble unless you are handy with a lathe as I don't have any of those parts.
 

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That is not good......will you ever get those parts in? I'm thinking that they weren't in the gun when I got it as I would have noticed them fall out
 
The parts I have in stock are left over from when Most Atlantic was distributing the guns. When they closed up, they paid us what they owed us in parts and guns. I was able to buy the parts from the other reps and have been selling them off a little at a time.

I am in the compressor biz as my primary income and have left spearguns to the active companies. Besides, the Russians are impossible to work with and have jacked up pricing to well beyond ridiculous. The stock I have left is considered "Closeout" and when it is gone, it is gone.

Sorry ... I know that isn't what you wanted to hear.
 
Totally understandable and I appreciate you helping me out with all of this. Do you have any leads as to where I could get the parts I am missing?
 
Other than to make them ... no. Sorry.:duh
--------------------------------------------


UPDATE ... I found some valve bodies and valve bushings hidden in another cloth bag of parts!!
 
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Your only hope is to buy the missing inlet valve parts from the company that makes the "Seabear", now called "Orion", after the speargun business was hived off from the parent arms manufacturer. I just checked the "harpoongun" website (mentioned earlier in this thread) where they used to be and it is no longer operating, so they have either changed web-sites or have stopped making the gun. I think that dealer stores over there may still have these inlet valve spare parts in stock, it is just a case of finding them. Fortunately it will be a small package, so shipping should not be a problem.

Some web-sites to look at:

http://apox.ru/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=420&Itemid=69

http://ohotnici.ru/podvodnoe_ruje_rp_1811.html
 
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It seems that the gun is now being distributed by a model airplane engine manufacturer. They claim to be the manufacturer, but who can tell with the Russians. I hope you have better luck with getting information than I did.

Sea Bear 21
 
rcontrera said:
It seems that the gun is now being distributed by a model airplane engine manufacturer. They claim to be the manufacturer, but who can tell with the Russians. I hope you have better luck with getting information than I did.

Sea Bear 21
Click to expand...

The NV company appears to be carrying on the model airplane engine manufacturing as a private business by using the same staff as before when it was a State run factory. Probably the "Seabear" operation was a good fit for their "skills set", so they took it over as well. Aluminium castings and small machined parts make the speargun not that dissimilar to the model airplane engines, except for the long stainless steel barrels. I note that the gun seems to be only available as the small version which was previously called the "AK-45" by the former US distributor. If any changes have been made (trigger mechanism and muzzle are cited) then they do not appear to have affected the external appearance of the gun.

Looking at the gun on the accessories web page the company states that they have been manufacturing the gun for over 12 years.
 
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I finally annotated the "Seabear" schematic diagram to make inspecting it easier while cross-referencing the component parts list on two separate pages that came with the optional maintenance manual ("optional" in that you only received the instruction manual with the gun). The diagram is for the single power "AK" model. The variable power "MAK" model had a "power dial" located in the butt end of the rear tank. I have never seen a schematic for that version, but most of it is identical to the "AK" model except that it has a valve stem inlet valve in the rotating throttle "power dial" body that switches internal air flow between two ports. The low power port is virtually a pin hole in size!
 
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If anyone is interested, I have my whole stock of Seabear repair parts for sale. Because air compressor systems are my primary business, I just don't have the time to devote to making spear retainer gaskets and maintaining inventory anymore. I have a ton of raw material for cutting and drilling to build the SRG, lots of shafts as well as a ton of other parts. I think there are about ten pounds of the tail pieces alone. I had it all on eBay for $995 but had a new speargun in the mix at the time. Now, it is just the parts and a couple of gun bodies. If anyone wants it all, I can have my seabear links sent direct to your website and make you the contact point for people that are asking about parts.
 
Well all "Seabear" owners need those spear retainer gaskets, so hopefully someone will pick those parts up. Meanwhile here is the English language version of the "MAK" user manual; you can see the pumping table for yourselves. 400 pump strokes listed when even its own page 1 says do not exceed 375!
 
Smelling a rat with the "Seabear" pumping table after I first received the gun in 1998 I decided to do a numerical model using the respective internal volumes of the gun and the handpump after measuring all the internal parts and estimating or calculating the various volumes that I needed to adjust. The resulting spreadsheet is shown here in two sections as the single image was too large to be an attachment on its own. The multi-row pump stroke table is not shown, but it calculated the volume transferred into the gun and the volume lost for each stroke of the handpump, all 400 of them (i.e. 400 rows). To my surprise the pumping table was correct as can be seen by the correlation graphs on the right hand side of the spreadsheet. So how come one table in the instruction booklet for all the gun models? Then the penny dropped, the "RP-1" and "RP-2" models each had a different length handpump, they did not use the same handpump, so the pumping table was correct. As for the longest "RP-3" model, well it was just the "RP-1" with an extra section of barrel added onto it, in other words the "AK-72" and "AK-103" were basically the same gun as can be seen from the part numbers in the tables on the left hand side of the spreadsheet.

The "Seabear" was a modest success in the early to mid-nineties as it filled the gap created by the discontinuation of the Nemrod "Clipper", which with its larger diameter rear tank and fatter plastic grip handle made it probably the better of the two guns as it was not such a dead weight to lug around underwater. The "Seabear" however scored on its sculptural, high-tech looks and first-class finish, which while the arms factory continued to manufacture it stayed at an extremely high standard. Sloppy work was probably not tolerated, so everyone did their best (or else!).

Unfortunately the power dial equipped, power-operated line release lever "Neptune", a high-tech Russian pneumatic speargun available in both alloy and titanium models was not so lucky with its workforce, but that is another story.
 
Check out the photos of a "Pyrometer/Orion" speargun modified with a buoyancy shroud and side-mount reel integrated into the overall streamlining of the new outer jacket which is almost totally enclosing the gun. http://apox.ru/forum/topic/753-ruzhja-rp-pirometr-orion/page__st__200, posts #213 and #219.

It is hard to identify the original gun "hiding inside" unless you look very carefully at the many images taken of the modified gun. Here is one of them from the web-site.
 
"Seabear" users are stranded if their gun's piston loses its shock absorber, but the gun could use a move conventional muzzle and then just replace the existing spear tails to suit the new form of piston. Could be a business proposition for someone to offer retrofit muzzles and pistons, or an adaptor to use something else, like the Salvimar vacuum kit muzzle on the many "Seabear" guns in the USA.

I recently replaced my "Seabear" piston's polyurethane bush, the previous bush disintegrated just from continual pressure ramming it onto the muzzle's travel stop. It is easy to do if you put the piston tail or shank section in a drill press chuck and then push the piston down onto a level block of wood supporting the new polyurethane bush by pulling the drill press control lever down. This action forces the bush squarely onto the piston nose which is otherwise not very easy to do.

New guns can be ordered here, so possibly they may also supply spare parts such as the "spear retainer gaskets" which are consumable items: http://www.nvengines.com/index.php?option=com_virtuemart&Itemid=67
 
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