....travel-speargun....

[popgun pete]

Barrel alignment on these guns is debatable and forces on the joint can be a limiting factor. I opted with a twin barrel design for stability and a roller for recoil and better "torque" on the connection on my carbon roller design. Hybrid guns simply look more natural as a two piece spear. Fyi a slip tip shaft in my opinion is a must.

Actually we discussed a gun like this in the old Rollergun Group. It had a figure eight cross section barrel made up of two parallel aluminum tubes with windows in each tube end for the rollers on their axles. It was tossed around whether the rollers should be vertical or canted, the latter requiring a separate axle for each roller. The spear ran on a guide track in the valley between the two tubes and we never quite figured out the rear handle, although it could have also been a cocking stock gun. There was also a problem of the bands cutting on the edges of the tube front roller windows and eventually we gave up on it. Reworked your photos so that we could get a better look at it.

Inverted rollergun looks good, very inventive, which is what we like to see.

Part of the inspiration for the twin alloy tube gun was taken from a gun built into a tube structure by Thorburn, this one.

The other was a rifle like speargun which also had two tubes for the barrel, the ATS Sharpshooter. Somewhere I have a photo of it.

This rear band anchored gun was called an Arrow gun, it stored slack rubber band behind the handle, same as your gun. No need to double up the band battery as you do with side or secondary pulleys on what are cable rollerguns. The original Arrow gun had shields covering the bands to keep your hands away from moving rubber.

 

[popgun pete]

This is the Arrow Gun patent, you can see the band battery in the rear of the gun, behind its shields. It is a cable gun and was a source of ideas, even though it is not an underwater gun.

 

[popgun pete]

Barrel alignment on these guns is debatable and forces on the joint can be a limiting factor. I opted with a twin barrel design for stability and a roller for recoil and better "torque" on the connection on my carbon roller design. Hybrid guns simply look more natural as a two piece spear. Fyi a slip tip shaft in my opinion is a must.

Any additional info about your twin barrel carbon tube gun, do you make it in various sizes? Or can you adjust its length by setting the barrel at different depths into the rear stock?

Now I have found it,

Disco Twin | 95R Roller Travel Speargun | Black Reef Company

The Disco Twin Roller is a composite speargun that is simply effective. We recommend our "DB-F" for freedivers, scuba divers, or those simply looking to simplify their diving and rigging into one effective speargun. What is a fusion roller? The fusion roller is a hybrid combination of a double...

www.blackreefco.com

And another one, maybe you should start a thread on these guns.

 

[popgun pete]

The Arrow Gun was in a sense a speargun reversed and flipped as the bands moved to the rear and what would have been the top deck was now the bottom deck as a muzzle roller system was used to wind the long cables back on themselves. The thoughts were the band ran around the back of the handle position to avoid band length adjustments from side to side and that when cocked there were no bands to thrum on the top deck during the gun traverse. The taut bands ran close to the stock on the lower sides of the gun body. This idea goes back a long way to Ted Egan's cable gun, possibly the first ever cable gun with the slack bands hidden inside it. Regrettably I have never seen it, but it was powered by a wad of rubbers and was somewhat unreliable being made of what was available at the time. I have been told the gun still exists, Ted Egan having passed on decades ago.

The Arrow Gun could have two bands and either twin rollers or two axles, but was a single draw gun There were no energy losses as bands were not bent around rollers. Strictly speaking rollerguns send their bands around rollers, cable guns only send cable around the rollers which are much smaller in diameter.

This distinction does not work when the gun has both cable and band rollers like the guns that Seal made, the band rollers being to wrap the band storage through windows in the gun body at the back. Alemanni has made a number of similar guns https://www.alemanni-sub.com/en/
Simplicity goes out the window, especially when replacing those bands!

 

[popgun pete]

I had forgotten about the JBL Reaper, but looks like it was reviewed in the past here,

JBL Reaper speargun - Spearfishing World forum

Description for the Reaper speargun from JBL website(Quote)I saw the new JBL Reaper speargun and took pics. The bands come with very long wishbones and a long taper on the rubber. A lot of band stretch can be reclaimed changing the stock bands.I was…

spearfishing.world

Not a fan of plastic triggers, but they are resorted to when keeping guns floaters, especially non-cocking stock guns. Some years back Undersee went into eurogun territory and when the aspect of metal parts was raised produced a version with a full metal trigger This gun, which from memory may have been "the Don", was reputedly not a great floater, unless it had a longer barrel tube. By the time I decided to buy one to check it out the gun was discontinued for a new version which discarded that all metal trigger. Reaper mech below seems to be a Rob Allen clone, but which one as the latter has changed over time?
View attachment 59242
View attachment 59243
View attachment 59265

The JBL "Reaper" has a very distinctive trigger finger guard, possibly just to provide a distinguishing feature. When Scubapro ordered their Sten competitor as a bigger and better pneumatic they squared up the "Magnum" gun's trigger finger guard which looked a bit odd until everyone got used to it.
View attachment 59266

Either "the Don" speargun became too costly to make in terms of sourcing the metal parts or the desire for a better floater after the shot was too great as at some time a second version appeared with what looks like an Asian parts bin handle. Not saying that there is anything wrong with these handles, but they are most likely derivative of something that was copied. Here you can see the changes. If I ever get my hands on the first version I will pull it apart so we can see what is what.

 

[popgun pete]

Found a review of the JBL Travel Magnum by some guy that read OK until I looked at his photos, ostensibly of the Travel Magnum. Now these are likely stock images and the size may be right, but there are no barrel joins in the full length gun, so maybe this was an "internet review" at a distance. Have changed his original oblique gun images to be side by side, but otherwise nothing else.

 

[popgun pete]

Just purchased the Reaper Travel gun in order to get a better look at it, will take a few weeks to get here. Only available in 100 cm, but probably a long split shaft may be too vulnerable, so they kept the gun short, for now anyway.

The best solution if you have a regular travel haunt is to leave some shaft there.

 

[GRAPHITE SPEARGUNS]

I live in nz and our local manufacturer "wettie" have there own aluminium travel gun also (homepage) i wonder how strong that 6.4mm travel shaft will be

 

[popgun pete]

Well let us see what they say about it.

 

[popgun pete]

Well I have a few sub 7 mm shafts, but that is only because I never checked the shaft size of the guns that had them when I bought them. I would rather hit a fish with 8 mm or in the old scale 5/16", these skinny shafts seem designed for Mediterranean fish or slim flighty fish. Actually the Wettie gun advert suggests the gun is for reef fishing, being a Reef Travel gun.

 

[GRAPHITE SPEARGUNS]

i think the only down side to a travel gun is the shaft i wonder if there will ever be anything innovative to fix the inherent weakness

 

[popgun pete]

i think the only down side to a travel gun is the shaft i wonder if there will ever be anything innovative to fix the inherent weakness

Post #73 sought to canvas a shaft fattened up in two places to strengthen it and yet not make it too heavy. I sent the idea to Julie Riffe but never got a reply, however they are busy people and I have communicated with them before, particularly Jay when he was still with us, and in a way still is.

 

[GRAPHITE SPEARGUNS]

Post #73 sought to canvas a shaft fattened up in two places to strengthen it and yet not make it too heavy. I sent the idea to Julie Riffe but never got a reply, however they are busy people and I have communicated with them before, particularly Jay when he was still with us, and in a way still is.

Hi Pete Have you seen the alemanni 135 special travel video on youtube Itio sets the gun up and it looks like his shaft doesn't even use thread where the shaft connects, looks like it just slides in and is held together by dyneema. The brilliant thing it looks as though alemanni has done is he uses the shooting line to hold the two pieces of the shaft together so i guess in theory if a fish is hit and it runs hard the shaft is actually being held together even harder.

 

[popgun pete]

I discussed them here some time ago, so I went looking and found photos which show the spear connection. It is a screw thread.

Lens barrel distortion is curving the spears in the above image.

Note the above photo shows a gun with a spear not split 50:50, the tail end appears shorter than the front.

 

[popgun pete]

Pumping the image size up you can see the threaded end.

 

[popgun pete]

I have not visited Alemanni's site in a long time, here are more recent photos.

 

[GRAPHITE SPEARGUNS]

I have not visited Alemanni's site in a long time, here are more recent photos.

this youtube video is from 8 months ago at 1.36 you get a good look at the spear and how they are joined together.

 

[popgun pete]

I watched the video. He is using a Morse taper to hold the spear together, you can see him bouncing the spear on its butt to drive it more tightly together. The line he ties is to keep the front and rear of the shaft in contact if and when the drag from the fish pulls the spear apart. A precise taper is harder to cut than a screw thread, but he has probably set up for it. You have to keep grit out of the taper as it will not lock or it could jam completely. Big gun to manhandle around!

Note if the taper jams it is a bugger to pull apart, so it is made so a quick jerk will separate it. A fish can easily deliver that jerk, so he makes the rear of the shaft detachable. The fish tows the now articulated spear which it will be unlikely to bend. Tapers are used to mount the drill chuck in a lathe's tailstock drill, but are much bigger in size.

 

[GRAPHITE SPEARGUNS]

Yes that gun is absolutely massive. wettie updated there instagram showing off the travel shaft looks like they come in both 6,5mm and 7,9mm surely the bigger of the two is more stout may have to pop in store and check em out.

 

[popgun pete]

The thing to remember is Alemanni spearguns are expensive, he can lavish the guns with every painstaking detail, whereas a mass production gun has to use economical to manufacture parts, and churn them out in large numbers to make some money.