Which spear gun is better?

We have been having great fun retrofitting these to lots of different makes of guns & pool testing then. They only come on 600 & 400ml atm but they make a noticeable difference on recoil & accuracy. That little red set is the 600ml on a 1100 mid handle gun with a 1.5 x6.75m spear & single 16mm rubber. It’s a bit too much for a little gun for run of the mill spearfishing, but for target shooting, It can put the spear into the previous hole on target 4m from the muzzle. It’s eye opening when the accuracy potential of spears & guns can be revealed, there is no reason they can’t be more accurate than target archery equipment.
We are having an abundance of little dolphin fish off Sydney atm & ole mate used it to put a few peanut size ones in the esky.
We hopefully will have “no drill” ballasts for tube guns ready as soon as this Carona virus starts to come under control & things get back to normal.

Riffe has wooden stabilizers as extras, when the guns would all probably benefit from them as standard as it keeps band ends from skidding along the barrel.and lifting spear tails up as they fatten up.

The Riffe kits are really effective on their bluewater cannons. I think there is some room for smaller ones on timber reef guns as well & not just bluewater guns, especially when accuracy is important & not just power.

Mr. X said:

Would a broad cuttlefish or oval barrel, like several of the C4 spearguns have, help similarly to side-wing stabilized shown above?

Click to expand...

The cuttlefish shape is certainly about ballast, balance & trying to manage the moment of inertia. The ballasts above are a retrofit option for timber guns. This also allows the mass & their position to be customised.
The closer to the muzzle they are placed the greater the moment of inertia, the closer to the handle the less. The band lifters at the front can also be weighted to resist rotation & also by placing the rubbers parallel with the spear they help a little in this way. It’s all a compromise & it changes quickly on longer guns as the further the muzzle is from the handle that distance is squared in the coefficient & mass isn’t. Guns to 1100 are a dream to work with, 1400mm guns require a very different approach than just putting a longer barrel & spear onto stock items.

There is a degree of compromise involved as if you make a gun too much of a paddle it then becomes harder to track anything moving swiftly. On the other hand if you can wait or manoeuvre your gun for the fish to swim through the shaft flight line then you don't do a lot of tracking once you have hauled the gun around on its new heading. With food placed in the water column you will know where the target fish will be heading if it looks hungry and is already munching on the scraps.

When guns switched from in-line pull (screw socket bands and muzzles) using wrap around bands and loop muzzles there was no problem if they still used wire wishbones as the bands were kept off the timber stock, especially if the gun was long. However cord wishbones sit on the stock and if you don't have in-line band pull then you can have shaft tail lift problems. Band elevators, which have come and gone over the years, are really needed on guns with cord wishbones and wider stocks, but not on pipe or tube guns which have very narrow stocks. Over the decades there has been a lot of mix and match of gun components without much thought as to the consequences. This has been tolerated as longer guns, which are more common, have a very shallow angle of the bands to the spear axis which is closely approaching in-line band pull.

Another approach was to put band troughs in the wide timber stocks to provide a clearance or path for the contracting bands.

Mr. X said:

Would a broad cuttlefish or oval barrel, like several of the C4 spearguns have, help similarly to side-wing stabilized shown above?

Click to expand...

The C4 guns that use the twin metal plate muzzle effectively have band elevators in the set of side spigots that the plates are mounted on.