NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Sisteco Prismatic Compass
From: Doug Royer
Date: 2004 Mar 19, 14:44 -0800
From: Doug Royer
Date: 2004 Mar 19, 14:44 -0800
Fred,dissapointing to hear about the sextant you purchaced.I hope you got it for a good price including shipping charges.I am always leary of purchaceing items that I cannot see and touch beforehand. As for the German vs Japanese sextants it is my opinion,biased of course,that the Japanese have for quite some time superior equipment to the German equipment.The Tamaya and Simex sextants are the best in the world today when you consider basic unit price,repair and parts replacement,weight and robustness. I'm not downplaying the German stuff totally.There are some great sextants made by them.For my money any Tamaya is the best sextant. I've had some discussions with Joel Jacobs off list about differant sextants etc(and other sea fareing topics). With his background and experiances he has a wealth of info and is willing to exchange ideas and experiances.He has a "D" rateing in the U.S. Navy and much experiance in the developement of Tamaya sextants. Hope you like your "new" toy. By the way,do you collect older sextants?Don't you also have some older British equipment you wrote about in the past?Just curious. Regarding Cassens and Plath, I just received yesterday one I purchased on Ebay. I was rather disappointed that the shades were glued in. I would say Tamaya's Spica would be the only ultra-high quality sextant left. I am pleased to see that they have come down in price about $200 (and the Jupiter went up $200). Fred > On a related note, I did a google seach for C.Plath and found to my > shock, that they no longer exist; that they were bought out by Sperry > (a venerable firm that has been around for some time). I also did a > search of Weems and Plath and found that they appear to no longer sell > their own model of brass sextant; they now market the Tamaya. > > Is this the end of the era of the superb craftsmanship of the German > sextant? Is Cassens and Plath still around? Are they solvent?