Build Your First Speargun - A Beginners Primer
Posted By Sven Anderson on 17 March 2003
Of the myriad pursuits that both freedivers and SCUBA divers enjoy, spearfishing is right up there on the list. Though there is a like myriad of commercially available equipment to the aspiring and experienced "spearo", the act of providing for the table with a speargun of your own construction, a design refined with your experience and equipped to your exact needs is one of unparalleled pride.
So what's to stop you?
Most speargun manufacturers offer their parts individually or in kit form that will include the trigger mechanism, line release, handle, butt pad, line anchor and fasteners. Hit up their websites for the particulars.
The space available here is certainly not enough to give you a line by line set of instructions, but rather an overview to whet your appetite. It's also not within the scope of this article or site to teach woodworking and tool safety either, but a very modestly equipped hobbyist will have the tools necessary to do any operation necessary. For the most part, working with wood is more familiar to the average "afficianado" so we'll concentrate on a wooden-stocked gun, though there are certainly great designs utilizing metal and composite plastic tube barrels and even combinations utilizing all three materials.
You can look in the threads here on the site's forums for discussions on
the varieties of wood appropriate for speargun construction, but it pretty
much comes down to Teak or Mahogany. Teak's oily and beautiful grain resists
the watery environment well, has built-in bouyancy and you can't beat the
look of a finely finished teak stock. It get's pricey so take your time in
choosing a straight, tight grained piece free of knots and defects. What
looks good as a highly figured piece of furniture is not what you want in a
speargun.
The barrel or stock of a wooden gun is most often a laminated stack of thin strips cut on the table saw and planed smooth and of equal thickness, giving the wood additional strength and resistance to twisting. Of great importance and patience-trying is the "seasoning" or drying/stabilizing of the wood, where the wood is brought indoors and allowed to reduce it's moisture content. This will help your finished product stay straight, aid in construction and fill your room with an exotic aroma not to be missed. The strips are alternately reversed in their grain's direction and glued together with epoxy and left to stabilize again for an unbearably long time, often 3-4 weeks.
Following the scraping, rough trimming and truing of the blank stock, the
maddeningly fun part starts- the layout of the hardware. A good ruler and
decaffeinated beverages are mandatory here. Happily, most if not all
difficulty associated with this step is lessened by just taking your time
and marking everything with masking tape and pencil. Making shallow cuts to
your final depth(s) will let you catch any errors and minimize tool and
temper wear.
The shaft's track is usually the operation that puts off most first-timers, needlessly. The idea of having to cut a perfectly straight groove is daunting, but attainable. It's machined with a solidly mounted router equipped with a cove bit slightly larger than the shaft's diameter, from the eventual muzzle end to the location of the trigger pocket. Clamping straight edges as fences on either side of the stock will ensure you a straight and true track for your spearshaft. Make multiple passes to ensure a straight and true track. Feel the fish's fear yet?
The trigger pocket is next, essentially a rectangular hole slightly shorter than the depth of the stock, depending on the trigger's size, track depth and the amount of wood you designate as the butt-end of the gun, drilled out with a drill press and some careful work with a sharp chisel. Take your time here as a mis-mounted trigger mechanism will frustrate you with jamming and an uneasy feeling when you go load that bazooka of yours for the first time. A good tip here is to have your spearshaft handy to aid in setting the depth and aligning the trigger mechanism with the track. Go slow, keep your fingers intact and take your time- the fish are only getting bigger...
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