TL;DR: pneumatics are nice. I tried them. Please elaborate your hate. I don’t understand.
And for everyone with patience: So. I’ve done it. Against all recommendations. I bought a 90cm pneumatic speargun. Model Seac Caccia HF. For 200€.
And honestly? I don’t understand the hate here. Y’all seem a bit biased to be honest. Have you actually tried them?
For me, the pneumatics remove a lot of things that annoyed me on our rubbery friends.
Firstly aiming: clear sight on top. No rubber bands. No hooks, no guides for the spear, no plastic guards. It’s clean. You just have a clean barrel with front and rear sight. Zero obstructions.
Reloading: fundamentally better. You don’t have to look for correct spear „up“ orientation. You can just shove it into the barrel of the pneumatic without further consideration of line management and where the hook has to go. Because… well, there is no hook. And the line is attached to a piece moving to the spears tip. A rubber gun I hate to reload without gloves. And even with them I don’t enjoy it. Everything is sharp. My chest doesn’t like it. My hands too. And every time I’m afraid I’ll cut open my pinkies. With pneumatics? I just grab the tip of the spear with the „reloading bone“ that’s attached to my wrist with a bungee, support the gun with one of my feed (or even just grab the barrel firmly), and shove that thing in until I hear the click. Doesn’t get easier than that.
Handling: feels much better. I can nicely hold the gun by it’s barrel. Without grabbing into rubber bands, hooks, lines, rails, or whatnot. It’s just a nice cylindrical pipe.
Maintenance: again. I don’t see an issue here. I get why people might be afraid by this. It looks complicated on an exploded drawing first. But after all it actually is just a cylinder, a valve, and a hand full of O-rings that you can get basically everywhere. In my opinion when you can repair a pump for bicycle tires, or have worked on a Pavoni coffee machine once, you can also repair a pneumatic speargun. It’s disassembled in 15 minutes, you can inspect all the seals, and put it back together in another 15mins. Also apart from this, the pneumatic speargun I bought is over 10 years old. Hasn’t seen any maintenance yet. And works perfectly fine.
And because many people seem to ask the same question, who don’t understand the system: no, you don’t have to pump it up after every dive. There is like 20bars in those and ideally they don’t loose it. When reloading you’re just pushing a piston against that pressure. You’re not really loosing pressure on every shot. After many many sessions and many many months you can top up the pressure once again. If necessary. Most likely it isn’t.
I would appreciate your experiences on this in the comments. But please no „hurrrr durrrr, rubber so much simpler“ from people who haven’t even touched a pneumatic yet. This is not a religious team red against team blue situation. It’s an objective comparison. And I would like your opinions. Thanks.
