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A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Backlash
From: Robert Eno
Date: 2005 May 24, 07:12 -0400
From: Robert Eno
Date: 2005 May 24, 07:12 -0400
A late acquaintance of mine who repaired sextants and other nautical instruments for decades, told me that even the finest sextants can have a bit of backlash. His suggestion to me was to always rotate the tangent screw one way when making observations so as to preclude the possibility of backlash errors. I have followed this practice for years even though I own a C.Plath which, theoretically, should have no backlash whatsoever. But back to removing backlash: my understanding is that this is not a repairable problem; that backlash is a result of poor machining of the arc, hence my earlier question about how the instrument shop removed this error. Robert ----- Original Message ----- From: "Alexandre Eremenko"To: Sent: Tuesday, May 24, 2005 4:32 AM Subject: Re: Visit to Freiberg > On Mon, 23 May 2005, Bill wrote: > >> Interesting that your IC was zero, which matches the arc error at 0d. > > Before checking the arc they SET Index error to be ZERO, > by adjusting the horizon mirror. > Zero is used as a point of reference, so arc correction > at zero is zero by DEFINITION. > >> I am >> surprised the backlash problem did not show up in your IE checks. > > I am also somewhat surprised. One explanation is that I > always tried to follow the Russian manual recommendation > to always rotate the screw (when touching the bodies) in one direction:-) > Including the index error checks. > The recommendation is given exactly for the purpose of > reducing the backlash effect. > > On the other hand, I did try to estimate backlash myself > (with stars) and came to the conclusion that it was nonsubstantial. > So the relatively large errors in my star to star distances (like > 0.3'-0.6') > remain unexplained. Fred also tried my sextant once, > the result had a similar error to my ones: about 0.3' with > art horizon. > > Alex.