• Welcome to the DeeperBlue.com Forums, the largest online community dedicated to Freediving, Scuba Diving and Spearfishing. To gain full access to the DeeperBlue.com Forums you must register for a free account. As a registered member you will be able to:

    • Join over 44,280+ fellow diving enthusiasts from around the world on this forum
    • Participate in and browse from over 516,210+ posts.
    • Communicate privately with other divers from around the world.
    • Post your own photos or view from 7,441+ user submitted images.
    • All this and much more...

    You can gain access to all this absolutely free when you register for an account, so sign up today!

....travel-speargun....

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.
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.

 
Last edited:
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.

 
Last edited:
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,


And another one, maybe you should start a thread on these guns.
 
Last edited:
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!
 
Last edited:
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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
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
 
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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
Last edited:
I have not visited Alemanni's site in a long time, here are more recent photos.

 
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.
 
Last edited:
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.
 
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.
 
Cookies are required to use this site. You must accept them to continue using the site. Learn more…