NavList:

Jeremy:

The stick leads you mention, 0.5 mm are the Pentel type. These leads cannot be "sharpened". So called "pencil pointers" work with the old, perhaps no longer made wooden "draftsmen’s pencils" once offered by Kohinoor and or Steadler, pardon any misspellings. Re things no longer made, include the slide rule. These pencils came in a great variety of hardness, ranging from near charcoal to leads nearly as hard as a tool steel center punch, they being 9H. There were also Pentel leads made fore drawing on mylar, a plastic material I never liked. The virtue of mylar supposedly was that one could spill coffee on a mylar drawing without ruining it, spilling coffee on a paper sheet ruined the drawing. A squad boss I worked for once told me to send the original out for a print, and spill coffee on that.

As to being exposed to drafting courses at college, not much of a surprise there, in any sort of a "technical college". As to your being a dud at drafting, some people become ships officers, others become draftsmen, the respective skills/talents/leanings not necessarily found in the same individual.

The USPS form I mentioned, CLS98, is not VP-OS (Universal Plotting Sheet) you mentioned. I have a couple of pads of the VP-OS and have used it a little in class exercises. The VP-OS covers 4 degrees x 4 degrees. The USPS form covers a 1 degree x 1 degree area. I've emailed a copy of this separately.

I believe that it was probably the first 3 body fix I ever shot, one spring evening a couple of years ago at Emerald Isle, North Carolina. Moon, Jupiter and Venus plotted on one of these. The triangle formed by the three LOP’s turned out to be so small as to be difficult to draw, almost crossing at a single point, though not quite. It must have been dumb luck. I played around with the plot a bit, enlarging the scale until I got a readily visible triangle. My fix, the plot enlarged, was inside the cocked hat.

Alan

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