I’ve been impressed with the new model A5 I’ve been trying out for a couple of seasons, to try to keep my rarified Auto-5 Stalkers from taking too much more abuse. The new A5 has been flawless after salt/fresh, rainy, LA coastal marsh use and sub-freezing around here. I probably am far less careful with it than I am with my Stalkers these days. It spends time sitting in water in the bottom of pirogues, getting deluged with rain, sticky delta mud, and sucking up millfoil and marsh weeds/gunk. At most it only gets hosed off and hung upside down, with the occasional squirt of oil or spray of eezox, until after the season. None of the SBEs I owned or was around would have functioned through half of that….they were exceedingly vulnerable to trash, temps, and the right amount of lube. Sure, the design is a good design, but execution/little details seem to make a big difference with inertia guns….very low mass in moving parts requires more spring force/balance in the system to handle adversity, it seems.
Others love them, but after delta mud and rice stubble dust, I went back to the old, faithful Stalkers.
Last edited by hh4whiskey; 01/02/23.
