Читать книгу Blowgun Techniques - Amante P. Marinas Sr. - Страница 11

MODERN BLOWGUNS

Modern blowguns are made from heat-tempered, precision seamless aluminum. Thus, the barrel is relatively light and will not rust. The modern blowgun is provided with a mouthpiece and shoots darts with plastic tails and steel or bamboo shafts.

BARREL

Modern blowguns can be one-piece, two-piece or three-piece. The latter two can be assembled and disassembled in minutes. The short sections are connected to each other with plastic couplings.

Take-down blowguns are designed for easy carrying to the target site. A one-piece, 5-foot blowgun will be difficult to transport.

Some modern blowguns are also designed as walking canes (Figure 2-5).

MOUTHPIECE

The modern blowgun features a mouthpiece (Figure 2-5, Figure 2-6). Most traditional blowguns do not have mouthpieces. The mouthpiece allows the focusing of the blown air into the launching of the dart. Thus, there is little wasted air.

The mouthpiece, made of plastic, is a molded one-piece construction with safety rings to prevent inhaling the dart. There is no such provision in the traditional blowguns. Hence, the traditional blowguns required more skill in its use considering that they were oftentimes aimed at targets overhead. Thus, there is greater risk of inhaling a dart when shooting a traditional blowgun.

The mouthpiece is not necessary when you only shoot occasionally. There will be little harm if your teeth or lips touch an aluminum or bamboo tube. However, if you shoot a couple of hundred darts a day, you need to use a mouthpiece.

In my case, I shot the .51 caliber blowgun without a mouthpiece. However after shooting 200 darts a day for 5 days, I felt indentations in my lower and upper lip. So I made a mouthpiece for it.

You will not feel comfortable shooting a .625 caliber blowgun with no mouthpiece. It is just too big for the mouth.

PROJECTILES

The tail of the commercial dart can be either a cone or a spherical bead (Figure 2-7). The cone darts come with sharp or broad head point shafts or with plastic broad heads.

Commercial darts can have cone tails that are white, orange, green, blue, red, or yellow. The flange of the cone is constructed such that it collapses when pushed through the mouthpiece past the safety ring. As soon as the dart clears the mouthpiece into the barrel, the cone returns to its original shape. With this feature, the possibility of inhaling such a dart is unlikely.

The darts of .40 caliber blowguns have 4-inch steel shafts that have to be inserted into plastic cones or beads. The darts of .50 caliber blowguns have 3 ¹⁄₈-inch shafts. The shafts of the .625 caliber darts are 4 inches long.

Modern blowguns can also be loaded with paintballs—thin nylon coated balls that break upon impact, releasing a water-soluble dye.

QUIVER

Most modern blowguns are provided with quivers that are attached to the barrel. The quivers can hold ten or eight darts (Figure 2-9).

FOAM GRIP

Most blowguns are provided with a foam grip for comfort and for protection against the cold of winter (Figure 2-9). The placement of the grip will depend on the length of the shooter’s arm.