While in San Diego at the residence of Jack Prodanovich, I recognized a speargun which Ron Mullins had described to me.  Jack allowed me to take pictures of this gun with my digital camera. I also took a few with my regular 'film' camera.

We had previously seen a drawing of this speargun in Vane Ivanovic's book Modern Spearfishing. Please see the illustration.
Note carefully that the spearshaft is loaded in cocked in the halfway position on the first handle. This is an intermediate power position.The fully cocked position is at the back handle.
This is a French gun and the stamped name and address are clearly visible.'Le Fusil Americain sous Marin'. The rubber power band was not present, but it is not hard to figure out where it went. It can be seen in the above illustration. The gun has a 'sliding shaft carrier', an 'over-center' supercharging lever and a transverse band-tension-equalization, anchor roller. It appears that the band was continuous, but possibly had a wishbone. The carrier travelled in a track from the back of the rear handle to the nosepiece 'stop' pushing upon back of the shaft the whole way.  There is a wedge-shaped slide ring which fits into the nosepiece, can be seen in 7th image.

Please have a look at these images of this remarkable speargun. It is very well made and completely functional. It is not an experiment, but a real, functional speargun. Sorry for the large file size of this web page full of large images.


The transverse bar which comes out of the shank of the speartip is used to hold onto and push the shaft against the rubber pressure to cock the gun partially. This fact is verified in Ivanovic's Book, Modern Spearfishing, 1954. The reel appears to be made from 'Bakelite' plastic (phenolic urea).

Note the line release at the back end of the gun. It is the finger-like device on the far left of image.

Note the shaft carrier. This is equivalent to a 'throwing plate' in the small Japanese rollerguns. The line release
is a finger-like device on the back side of gun tube behind the rear handle. It can only be seen in this image as
a shadow on the towel.


On the left of the above image you can see the transverse roller, which would be equivalent to the band anchor on Niko or Memo's guns.

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The name is stamped ' Le Fusil Americain sous.Marin  Ste S.G.D.G.  8 (S?) Rue Du Congres NICE'. It shouldn't be too hard to trace with a pedigree like this.

See image of the two front rollers inside of cowling. Note the round black rubber stop. This part
corresponds with a matching element on the shaft carrier.

Please see image of the transverse roller which is equivalent to the band anchor at the bottom of the gun.

It appears that to actually shoot this gun, the diver had to grip and depress the trigger and press a 'lock-out' button
in the forward handle prior to acutally pulling the rear trigger and firing the spearshaft. If the forward handle
was not locked in the sear-open position, the shaft would possibly damage the forward sear mechanism.
 When the shaft is inserted back into the gun, it slips in easily making a click as the mechanism latches behind
each trigger (sear). Sorry, I know nothing about the actual mechanics and leverages of the mechanism.

It appears that the sequence of actions to cock the gun was as follows.
1. The shaft is inserted into the enclosed tube track.The carrier is all the way forward and the lever is also forward.
2. The diver pushes on the crossbar in the spearshaft and forced the spearshaft to stretch the rubber on the carrier to it's rear position, like cocking a spring gun. The forward trigger is 'locked-out' in the open position.
3. After the shaft is seared-up, the supercharging lever is pulled back into an over-center lock position. This concept
was also used in the Hurricane.

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