SettingSteel Spearfishing: The Squirrels Euro Enclosed Track Speargun

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

The Squirrels Euro Enclosed Track Speargun

I've been playing around with the idea of an enclosed track Euro speargun for about 4 months now (more or less about the time my son-the Squirrel- had mentioned he wanted a Euro speargun for his B-Day) so I decided to combine some of my slim down versions of my regular enclosed track spearguns with some Euro gun concepts.

Here's the breakdown:

First off the decision was to determine the Handle/Trig mech for the speargun. It was a toss up between the Demka or Marlin handles, and since the Demka was unavailable (I think its an awesome handle) I went with the Marlin...a sweet, smooth as butter, handle/trig that allows for a R or L line release.
The speargun has a double taper front to back, it is about 3/4" in the front and widens to about 1 3/4" in the back, they call it a cuttlefish designed speargun., and its triad shape side to side-not exactly anything new as I have been making this similiar design in my regular spearguns for about 2 years now. But for this Euro I decided to tweek it as much as possible so it can live up to its "Euro fame" of a fast, light, smooth tracking speargun....so I started trimming fat (wood) off the design to make it as streamlined as possible, and the only way to do it without any bend in the barrel was with carbon fiber, so I laminated carbon fiber (CF) between the wood lams and on the bottom (belly, another one of my trademark designs)

of the speargun, this resulted in a height less than 2cm (think a little under a quarter-25 cents) not including the track. I added some lead shots front and rear for ballast, the speargun sinks slowly, very slowly, horizontally with shaft, and floats vertically without. This gun tracks incredibly fast and light and feels like a gun half its size in the water. From band to fin the gun is 110/115cm, total length is 130cm, 2 bands 5/8" . The shaft is a Riffe euro 9/32. The gun has a built in shark pic which doubles as the line retainer as well. I made the muzzle with CF to provide the structural support allowing me to bore the band holes as high as possible (inline with the shaft) the space b/t shaft and bands is about 1/16", so the recoil is hardly felt, that coupled with the spearguns cuttlefish design,

lets even the wimpiest of kids (er, ummm no pun intended Squirrel ;) shoot the gun without flinching, and shaft whip is nonexistant (enclosed track). The enclosed track was not as complicated as I originally thought. To my knowledge there are no enclosed track Euro spearguns commercially produced on the market today, and very few if any gun builders have made them. For those of you who never have shot an enclosed track gun I urge you to give it a try, you'll probably never go back (same goes for wood compared to metal spearguns) I've been using graphite on most of my tracks as of late so this speargun got the graphite too...I really like the way the graphite sizzles the shaft off the track. The gun shoots to the end of 5 wraps (or 2 depends how your counting) and penetrated up to the flopper in 3/4 plywood...we took it out this weekend and it performed quite nicely ( http://settingsteel-spearfishing.blogspot.com/2009/05/fowey-rocks-spearfishing-report.html ) I'll probably be adding this gun to my line of Miami custom made spearguns, as the Euro type speargun has proven itself time and again to be a "fish, Killa"....so whats next? How about an Ipe/Basswood (yep basswood, like balsa wood) Eurogun..... report to follow!