"new" Toy

[68-eldo]

I know this is not really benchmark related but.....

 

Several years ago They were having a major clean up (read throwing session) and one of the things that ended up in the scrap metal pile was this:

 

 

As the condition of my garage shows I could not let that go, so I brought it home. Recently I got a book called “Introductory Surveying” by James R. Wirshing and Roy H. Wirshing. It shows how to set up and use a transit. Now I am playing with it.

 

The only problem is there was no tripod and no rod. Ebay may be the answer. Anybody have another source. I prefer the older items.

 

Thanks

[+Renegade Knight]

eBay, or being in the right place at the right time when a survey firm tosses their old equipment. Or when they go bankrupt and it's auctioned off.

[Bill93]

I can't tell the exact model from your picture, but that type of unit in good condition with accessories seems to be collectable and is going for $500 on ebay. Typically they are K & E Paragon or Dietzgen 6100 or such. Are the graduated circles corroded on yours or is that only an effect in the photo?

 

I have one that I bought years ago at an auction for cheap because it had been knocked over and the uprights are bent. Kinda ruins its value for either construction use or collectable. I keep meaning to find time to tinker with straightening it. Nothing else seems to be wrong with it, and if you only turn horizontal angles it is pretty close to original accuracy.

 

I did an exercise with it in the last couple weeks that I had wanted to do for a long time that involves history and surveying although no benchmarks. In 1842 there was a treaty with the local Indian tribes that moved them west of a line (now unmarked) for some number of years. The line went near or through "the old sycamore meeting tree" in 1842. The tree is now flooded by a Corps of Engineers lake, but the trunk still stands in 14 feet of water with another 10-12 feet above water. I wanted to know as precisely as possible the lat/lon coordinates.

 

So I took angles from three places (2 needed plus a check), measured the lat/lon of the setup positions multiple times with my handheld GPS, and came home and calculated where the tree was by iteration with the NGS Forward program. I was telling a friend about it and he said "hey I've wanted to try fishing that lake, lets take the boat out there. I'd never considered that because I'm not a water person. We went out and when we got to the tree the GPS goto read 4.5 feet (ok, I'm bragging too much, some waypoints I took were a few feet further off).

 

I considered that a success and a very entertaining exercise in what I know about surveying.

 

I also would like to find a bargain tripod with the 3 1/2 inch thread. I rigged a mounting on a camera tripod that is a little shaky but worked for the above exercise. A floor drain plug has the same thread except that it is tapered, and if you screw it in too far it can become disengaged and possibly jammed.

 

To keep this thread legal with on-topic discussion, I would like to do a couple leveling runs with my transit as part of the search for some benchmarks. There is one that isn't too far from a found one and might only require 1 tripod setup. This would tell how deep the missing mark would have to be if buried, or whether the grading has taken it out. I definitely need a better tripod for that.

 

There is another found mark that doesn't seem to match the distances. I wonder if it was disturbed and "replanted" in a more convenient spot several feet away. I think there would be enough elevation change that I could detect it. This one would require 2 or maybe 3 tripod setups from a good benchmark.

[68-eldo]

I can't tell the exact model from your picture, but that type of unit in good condition with accessories seems to be collectable and is going for $500 on ebay. Typically they are K & E Paragon or Dietzgen 6100 or such. Are the graduated circles corroded on yours or is that only an effect in the photo?

 

 

The dial on the compass has the name Keuffel & Esser. I don't find a model number or name.

 

The elevation dial does have a light coat of rust that should polish off with little effort or damage to the graduations. The A and B azimuth scales are behind glass and covered with ivory doors. (Is that cool or what?) So they are in excellent condition. The wooden case is heavily infested with termites so I put it in the freezer at my mother’s house to kill them off. When I get it back I will take pictures of it.

[+m&h]

The website www.surveyhistory.org has a list of the first serial number of each year for K&E transits; it indicates that yours was made some time in 1943.

 

Robert Parrish, of Weaverville, NC, runs a business and website devoted to the restoration, repair, and sale of these older instruments. The website is www.antiquesurveying.com. We have had dealings with him on a couple of occasions; in our opinion, he's an honest, engaging expert.

 

We're looking forward to going out in a few days with our 1935 K&E/Young & Sons instrument to see if we can turn an angle on a mark between an extant RM and one that hasn't been seen for a while. We'll let you know.

[68-eldo]

The website www.surveyhistory.org has a list of the first serial number of each year for K&E transits; it indicates that yours was made some time in 1943.

 

Robert Parrish, of Weaverville, NC, runs a business and website devoted to the restoration, repair, and sale of these older instruments. The website is www.antiquesurveying.com. We have had dealings with him on a couple of occasions; in our opinion, he's an honest, engaging expert.

 

We're looking forward to going out in a few days with our 1935 K&E/Young & Sons instrument to see if we can turn an angle on a mark between an extant RM and one that hasn't been seen for a while. We'll let you know.

 

m&h thanks for the information. Knowing the year built adds a lot to the feeling for the transit. Thanks also for the web sites.

[+m&h]

Hello again. It's been more than "a few days," but today we did go out to Steilacoom, Washington, with our 1935 K&E transit, to see if we could turn the angle between RM1 and RM2 of SY0750, V 459. RM2 is well preserved in a somewhat protected slab of concrete, and the primary mark is easy to find, if badly corroded, in a large boulder that is awash at high tide. Which it almost was, but we could still site the instrument directly over the disk, and wade around the boulder with pants rolled up to look through the scope.

 

It was possible with the instrument and steel tape to narrow down very closely the spot where RM1 ought to be; it turned out to be within about four feet of the location we reached with a hand compass and the tape back in May. But the instrument also made it easier to see how very deeply the reference mark must now be buried in old railroad ballast and beach gravel. It's a discouraging amount of excavation to undertake anywhere, and quite foolhardy at this proximity to a railroad. We're happy to leave it not found.

[+GEO*Trailblazer 1]

Not as old as yours.

But I have just recently been handed this.

 

I know it is not set level.

See what kind of cool observations I can make-take-create now.

[68-eldo]

I've been tinkering with my transit and am learning more about it. I’ve been turning angles and measuring distance with the stadia hairs in the scope. I was experimenting on the stadia hairs. The box was still in the freezer so I didn’t have the information on the stadia constant. But I found the F+C dimension was not a factor. When I got the box back I found that was exactly the case. F+C is negligible according to the label on the box.

 

I set up a yard stick on the piano and from across the room did a stadia reading. The reading was 2 ¼ inches or 0.1875 ft. With a 100:1 ratio that is 18.75 ft. (18 ft. 9 inches). A measurement with a steel tape got a distance of 18 ft. 10 inches. If I did my math right that is a 0.44 percent error. That could be a reading error as the yard stick was marked off in 1/8ths of an inch with wide lines so it was not a real accurate reading. But then I was just messing around.

 

Then I was turning angles between the piano and TV. That needs a little more work to understand that. I get turning once and even doubling the angle OK but the math behind turning multiple angles needs more work.

 

Once I get a tripod maybe I can go out and turn angles to find some reference marks I have not been able to find.

 

Fun fun fun.

Edited July 21, 2006 by 68-eldo