NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
SNOT design. Was: Why is a sextant like it is?
From: Alexandre Eremenko
Date: 2004 Nov 18, 15:33 -0500
From: Alexandre Eremenko
Date: 2004 Nov 18, 15:33 -0500
Dear Chuck: >Add to >that if the handle were on the opposite side as now, >the arm would have to >be in the back between the legs. >Otherwise the handle would have to span the >entire front to avoid interfering with the arm. >This would add weight to the sextant. This message made me inspect my SNO-T again, and I found an interesting thing. Its design is very different from the conventional one. You can see this in many web photographs on e-bay. In most traditional sextants, the arm moves "in front of" or "above" the frame. In SNO-T (and Freiberger) it moves "inside" the frame. The frame is of "two layer" construction. And the arm moves between these two layers. This is very different from the C.Plath-type (Tamaya, Astra, SNO-M) and British sextants I know. Alex.