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Thanks for the fast response.  I'll look around the net for Plastimo.
Earlier I did find an outfit in France that sells Ebbco, but their
list of spares did not include what I wanted.

Further FWIWs: 1) My practice with the Ebbco was to check IE at the
beginning and end of a round of sights and average. As a rule the
result was around 1' IE. 2) One day I took morning and afternoon sun
sights from the top of the Gibbs Hill Light in Bermuda with my Ebbco,
my C. Plath and my vernier Davis. The resulting fixes were: 1 mile for
the Plath, 2 miles for the Ebbco, 4 miles for the Davis. 3) On the two
occasions I was able to compare my Plath results with a Satnav, one
came out spot-on with the longitude and 2' different on the latitude.
The next time (different boat) I was spot-on with the latitude and 2'
different vis-a-vis the longitude.

Hewitt

On 9/23/08, frankreed@historicalatlas.net  wrote:
>
>  Hewitt S., you wrote:
>  "I'm trying to restore an Ebbco sextant. What I need is a set of shades and
>  the spring retainer for the horizon mirror or an entire horizon mirror
>  assembly. The model I have is the later one with the larger mirrors and
>  three index-mirror shades."
>
>
> If you don't get any hits on this after a week, let me know. There are
>  several at Mystic Seaport (for classroom use, not in the collections) that
>  are in various states of repair, and it may be possible to cannibalize the
>  parts you need.
>
>
>  And you wrote:
>  "FWIW : I used an Ebbco for years and it always stayed true to the DR
>  and always got me there."
>
>
> True to the DR meaning...? As long as the fix and the DR were not more than
>  perhaps five miles apart, you would have considered that acceptable, right?
>  So random errors even as large as +/-2 minutes (on top of inescapable
>  observation errors) would have been hard to detect in the pre-GPS era.
>
>  Just so there's no misunderstanding, I always recommend plastic sextants to
>  people who want to do standard, basic LOP celestial navigation. But I would
>  note that I frequently find that the sorts of people who are interested in
>  celestial today are also interested in owning an instrument that they can be
>  proud of, and for reasons which are only partly rational, plastic sextants
>  don't make the cut.
>
>   -FER
>
>
>
>
>  >
>

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