Monday, March 11, 2013

Vintage Undersee Bantam Speargun

Ben Fernance's Vintage Undersee Bantam Speargun
Every once and a while you come a cross a strange speargun that gets you scratching your head. Ben Fernance sent me a couple pics of this contraption that was given to him. I did some scratching around and there is very little info on this very interesting speargun.
A strange cross between a Hawaiian Sling and a Speargun.
This strange gun looks like it is a hybrid Hawaiian Sling with a crude speargun type grip and mechanism. Might not be a bad idea for cave hunting and close shots in bad vis. I am not sure where the shooting line would go tho??

Top view of the Undersee Bantam
I think as the name 'Bantam' suggests that this was supposed to be a mini or compact speargun. Although I am not sure how effective it was and can picture this being used more by one of the James Bond girls in the 70's .... you know the shot with the busty bikini clad babe walking out he water with the speargun looking all sexy?

Anyway it would be seriously cool to find out more about this 'porno' speargun and maybe even find out if anyone can remember using one. Please leave a comments below ... this is going to be interesting :-)

Coatesman

P.S thanks to Ben for sending in the pics.


2 comments:

popgun pete said...

This is an early speargun made by Undersee Products in Australia. Fifties vintage, it uses a tilting washer friction type trigger to hold the spear at any position in the gun. The company made similar models out of cast aluminium such as the Comet and the Hornet before moving on to timber spearguns with the famous Undersee trigger mechanism which was widely copied, such as by Riffe in the USA. The Bazooka and Reefmaster being the most well known timber models in the sixties and seventies.

Unknown said...


The Undersee Bantam was introduced in 1954, and was quite popular at the time.