Front	Rear

Technical Details

I acquired my first Harpoon from Speleoshoppe in 1979, and a second from the NSS Consignment Sales in 2012.

The Spelean Harpoon is forged from aluminum alloy. Mine is 168 mm. tall, 89 mm. wide, and 17 mm. thick. The rope hole is 53 mm. high and 53 mm. wide. The top center thickness is 16 mm. The shaft length and width are 66 mm. and 28 mm., respectively. The eye measures 21 mm. by 21 mm. The ears are 20.6 mm. long. My Spelean Harpoon weighs 286 g.

The Spelean Harpoon has "HARPOON" forged in the front in faint, almost illegible characters.

Comments

The Spelean Harpoon is the original commercial Harpoon. These were not designed to prevent girth hitching - that isn't a problem that needed to be solved. Instead, the ears allow the Harpoon to be used as a Longhorn as shown in the left-hand sketch. Of course, it can also be used as a conventional figure eight. The ears are much less obtrusive than those on the MSR Eighthorn, but the harpoon is heavier. The Single Rope Technique Belay Eight is similar. All Harpoons are too large and heavy for my taste.

"Kerin" left the following historical information on my old site message board:

The Harpoon went out of production mid 1991 . The descender was on contract to the New South Wales Fire Brigade and other government rescue units as a general purpose descending device. The NSWFB purchased the last two batches of the descender from Spelean. I believe that when the descender ran out of stocks they went to SRTE to produce the SRTE version of it. The R8Ba has when purchased by the fire brigade has a second stamp with NSWFB rescue. I was told that the fire brigade purchased the design of the harpoon type descender. Firefighters are taught to use the quick access no drop method.