NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Greg B
Date: 2020 May 10, 18:21 -0700
Hi All,
This shutdown is the perfict time to revisite an old project of mine. When I studied for my CG Masters licence
I kept thinking that the part about set and drift was just like the wind triangle problems I had to do in my student days.
(I'm a cfi) I looked up the history of the E6B (and Mr. Weems who was a co-inventor of the original E6B.) I was facinated
by it. I found that Mr. Weems reduced the entire wind triangle formular to a very simple graphical calculator. Amazing!
I dug out my old E6B and tried a problem or two; it almost worked, except everything was off by 180 degrees.
That was when I realized that winds and currents are 180 degrees apart. i.e.; a current (set) flowing 090 degrees,
if it were a wind would be said to be out of the west (270 degrees). The easiest way to fix this was to simply
GO DOWN FROM THE CENTER GROMET (RATHER THAN UP FROM IT LIKE YOU DO FOR THE WIND) The last part was also easy; just scale the slide so 150 KT'S became 15.0 KTS and so forth. I checked around and couldent find anyone interested in producing one commercialy (not enough volume for a new product) so there it has set in my project draw. If anyone here besides myself still bothers to do set and drift you might consider making one from a E6B as you can get a cheap one for $15. So here is an attachment with my prototype. Enjoy.
Greg
Cat 28 MK2
L.I. NY