NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Protractor. Was: BRe: Perpendicularity check
From: Alexandre Eremenko
Date: 2004 Sep 22, 20:48 -0500
From: Alexandre Eremenko
Date: 2004 Sep 22, 20:48 -0500
Dear Robert, Interesting site, indeed! I did not know about it: www.warrenind.com/WKNavigation.html Could not find the prices of their merchandise though, or do they sell only on the phone rather than by Internet? Anyway, I bought my protractor from "tuchkan" of Kaliningrad. He has many of them, offers excellent photos and he is a nice guy in general. Other "Soviet" sellers, mmely.ru, maurnavy and bay_my_items also have plenty of them, just type "protractor" on e-bay search. The price seems to be almost standard on e-bay: $60 to $80. (I bought my one for $70. You can see it by typing the e-bay number 3742233954 The whole link is too long to include). But you have to add about $60 in the average for shipping and almost $40 or so for the money transfer, as the Soviets cannot use PayPal, and/or credit cards. These extras make many "Soviet" items non-competitive). On the protractor itself. It is made of some heavy alloy, probably brass. It resembles a sextant in construction: also has a worm skrew and a drum, actually two worms and two drums, for each moving hand. It comes in a wood box with a "passport" (=certificate), sometimes a brush. The certificate of my protractor lists the instrumental error for each 10 degrees of the limb, for each arm. The maximal correction is 2'. I wonder what they were (are??) used for. Except the evident task of determining a ship's position from the bearings of two angles between three objects. The book by A. J. Hughes "The Book of the Sextant" (1938) briefly mentions them, calling them "Station Pointers", has a picture of one, exactly like my one, and says: "A full description of the principle and use can be found in the Admiralty Manual on the station pointer". Can anyone suggest where to find this Manual, and/or what it contains?? Alex. On Wed, 22 Sep 2004, Robert Gainer wrote: > Alex, > The super-precise 3-armed protractor that you allude > to is still made and > used in this country. You can buy it at the manufactures > web site at > www.warrenind.com/WKNavigation.html, it comes in a right hand > and left hand > version. I am interested in your 3-arm protractor.