Hydro/pneumatic gun

[omega3]

Well my father finally brought my 2 Ukraine guns to me . I bought them in 1994 brand new for approx £5 each and I think they are very cool . The lower gun is a bit of a rareity I think.

when the spear is inserted, the water in the barrel is squeezed into the rubber sleeve through about 20 small holes.

when fired the spear is squeezed or spat out for want of a better term by the compressed air squeezing the sleeve. It works very well. What I find very cool is it is effortless to load and I mean effortless. It would be like loading a gun with half a bar pressure in it. It has a fair bit of power and next to no recoil as well as being near silent. It also can`t fire out of water unless the tube is filled with liquid(long story there)

So a bit of an anomaly I think when compared to say the Mamba system. It has the seals to keep the water out and this has the same seals to keep the water in.

I was servicing them to replace the awful quality seals which were in good condition but so poorly made. The rest is as good a build as any

I like it!

[Pastor]

There is some radical and excellent guns made out in the old USSR, Hyeparis is the guy in the know and with some seriously funny stories to go with them, usually involving his drunken mate falling around on the riverbank

[azapa]

they look awesome in that green adonized finish! whats the second trigger for on one gun?

[omega3]

Thats the safety. Just push finger forward to release the safety. It comes on automatically when the gun is loaded as the spear locks home. Another good idea. The rear sight is also pretty cool , it stores line and releases forward when the trigger is pulled and locks when the gun is loaded.......clever or what??

Nice tip Pastor I look him up.

[popgun pete]

I found this thread on a search, hence a bit late in commenting. I have two of the RPS-3 spearguns (PПC-3 in Russian) which use the rubber sleeve on multi-ported barrel system to separate injected water, during muzzle loading, from the compressed air reservoir. One is brand new, never been in the water, but the other is in very poor shape. I was wondering how your gun has survived use in salt water. Many of the smaller mechanism parts are only plated steel (looks like cadmium plate on the unused one, some silvery-grey stuff on the other, older, example) which seems to have suffered badly from immersion in seawater. In fact the gun is essentially ruined, so I completely disassembled it including the rear mechanism parts that are never meant to be removed, having been staked in place. Back home in the Ukraine and Russia diving is conducted in freshwater lakes and rivers, thus internal speargun corrosion is not such a worry in the short term. The design of the RPS-3 trigger mechanism is unique in that the size limitations imposed by mechanically releasing a spear tail which has to pass through an all important muzzle seal left little material to work with. For example the sear "tooth" (actually a tiny angled step inside a metal disc) moves only 1.5 mm to release, that being all that the sear tooth hangs onto on the mushroom headed shaft tail. It is so marginal that I wonder that anyone contemplated making a speargun this way, because that release system required very tight machining tolerances to make it work. The designers seem to have been driven by the desire to make something that was completely different from how other guns worked and they certainly achieved that, but at what manufacturing cost? I could never see a speargun like this being made in the West as you would go broke making it with all the precision machined parts, yet the rubber seals must be the worst that I have ever seen in a speargun, being rubber packing's rather than "O" rings, and very poor ones at that.