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A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: My Kollsman sextant.
From: David Pike
Date: 2021 Jun 18, 13:50 -0700
From: David Pike
Date: 2021 Jun 18, 13:50 -0700
Doug Flaunt you wrote: It appears that I don't have the mount. Gary's photos show a more complete unit. How difficult is it to find or make a mount?
Doug
It's quite difficult to find the real thing. Put it on your eBay watch list, be patient, and start saving up.
I'm not really interested in putting a lot of effort into it.
In that case, find a window you can see the celetial body through. Place the sextant on the window ledge doing basic chocking up with 1/2 inch timber plank. Then take a deck of cards and complete the final chocking up to one card thickness accuracy using playing cards. Kneel down in front of the sextant like Christopher Robin and you'll find it works fine. You don't need electrics for a bubble model in daylight. Night time or a pendulous reference model requires a bit more ingenuity on the lighting side. You'd need to experiment with a torch or 3 x PP3 batteries in series, or you might try a cheap 24V power supply off eBay. DaveP