NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: David Pike
Date: 2015 Jan 3, 03:50 -0800
1. I’ve just looked at the Kollsman again; mine’s 1471C-964.
2. I’ve also looked at the manual. There’s no internal heater, so two of the 3x9V batteries must have been worn out.
3. Interesting quotes from the manual were “WARNING. In the case of pressurized aircraft, do NOT open the shutter of mount until AFTER the sextant has been inserted to its “retracted” position.” and “WARNING. Removing the sextant with the mount shutter open in pressurized aircraft is dangerous”. You’re telling me! Were there no preventative interlocks like on the Smith’s? It doesn’t tell you to let the sextant up slowly. The quickest way to give a Vulcan Captain premature grey hair was to let the Smith’s shoot up like a 50mm shell out of a cannon.
4. Were the two little circular housings in the bottom of the case to hold the power lead?
5. After a bit of exercising the bubble forming mechanism, I’ve got the bubble behaving, but with a cross instead of tramlines, what’s the best way of judging the size of the ideal bubble.
6. I noticed Werner Luemann said the UK and German licensed Kollsmans had 3V lighting. It really would be interesting to know which procurement committee decided this was essential and what their reasoning was. Perhaps this is why the case for my Kollsman, which is 100% US arrived containing a spare RAF 3V bulb in addition to the usual 28V one, even though there appears to be nowhere on the sextant that you could possibly screw it. Dave