Same as you Nate, but you left out the ever famous plumb bob. Or the "beetle on the telephone pole stabber". I still "throw" my extension cords, lawn hoses, long ropes, etc, as if they were a steel tape. Works good and unwinds just like you'd expect.
1976 for those who care. Later I got to use one of those upside down reading Wild T?? That was troubling. Used my first EDM circa '79. My first GPS circa 2000, which I got to purchase.
Thanks for reminding me I'm old... 😉
Transit that left St. Louie in a Conestoga Wagon with a sign on the side that read "Colorado or Bust" and a 100-foot steel tape, plus a nice supply of chaining pins and a plumb bob on some cord. Transit set atop three stiff wooden legs, no adjustments allowed.
Transit and Tape
> Lots of stadia work, did some out to 1,000'. Used a 3 target Philadelphia rod and hand radios.
1000' doesn't leave much left on a Philly rod! 😉
Working for the Feds you see a lot of setups. Started in 1978 with a transit with a solar attachment(never used), and a HP-3805, used a CA-1000 for long shots, we were on the northern California coast and didn't see the sun enough so the office found a north seeking gyro instrument for us to use, 2 years later T-16 with DI-4, then Zeiss SM-4, would shoot dist. in chains and correct for slope but was tough to take solars with. Nikon NTD-4? really liked this gun, light and turned good angles, during this time used a long range HP EDM, shot 6 1/2 miles with a lot of glass. All good instruments.
I still carry that infamous plumb bob. I have managed to resist the urge to send it to USGS for calibration. I'm afraid they'd calibrate it for THEIR side of the mountain, and it'd hang funny on my side!
Which, bring on an idea. How about drilling a small hole in one, and installing a magnet, and using it to mess with the new guy? Hmmm try to get him to hang it plumb, by a gate....
Those of you who never pulled "Chain" (Also called tape, for some), have you ever found an electric fence, and used the thong to insulate yourself, and got the other guy? Its a funny prank, that won't happen as often these days!
N
> ... have you ever found an electric fence, and used the thong to insulate yourself, and got the other guy? Its a funny prank, that won't happen as often these days!
>
> N
No, but round here the pequin pepper is about as reliable a rite of passage for a green guy as there is. They're tiny, grow about anywhere that hasn't been landscaped/underbrushed recently, and look completely harmless. Don't know how many new surveyors around here have been sent running for the nearest water after being duped into gnawing on one, but I'd bet it'd take up a decent slice on a pie chart.
chili pequin
My grandparents had them growing in the flowerbeds at their place in Dallas.
A pot o' chili just isn't right without one or two...or six! :excruciating:
K & E 30" transit on a stiff-leg wood tripod with plumb bob and string only for centering over a point. I can still tie the slip knot on the Bob string. 100-foot steel tape (chain). In muddy Mississippi, we just kicked and stomped out a smooth dirt spot and put a plumbob dimple in the dirt we would mark with a bit of flagging punched in a nearby hole. I can still throw a chain - my surveying course college instructor gave us lab tests on chain tension, how to hold a chain away from the leather thong, how to uncoil the steel tape, "do it up" by fives and make the figure eight, and how to "throw" it, or coil it into the final circular loop. I learned slope chaining and taping a straight line, and all the associated calls for taping or chaining. I have seen "heat monkeys."
I did see a guy tumble down a hill once when he yelled "good!" and the front chairman let go just before the back chairman did, and he vanished in a puff of dust! I have run a dumpy level when the vibratory compactor and the wind played havoc on our automatic level. I watched in utter fascination one time when I saw a survey crew use a plane table. He asked me, "how do you know you got all your shots and did not leave any holes in your topo?" when he found out I was using a theodolite and level rod shooting stadia and getting rod readings with a zenith angle. I wrote a program for my HP 67 that gave me the elevation of the bottom of the level rod. We used a drafting arm graduated to degrees and minutes with an 18" plastic scale to plot the topo points and then did contouring by hand. I used a scale and a right triangle to interpolate the even-foot contours between two points. This method is described in Bouchard's 9th edition of "Surveying," which I used for years while teaching my surveying classes in Community College.
At first, we had a Tandy Radio Shack TRS model One that we used with a cassette player to load a COGO program. Any coordinates we generated, we copied them off the screen. We then bought an awesome dot-matrix tractor-feed printer that zinged out those pretty little coordinates that we plotted on a piece of purple grid paper. You know, the kind of grid paper that does not leave a grid background when you run an ammonia diazo print of the worksheet/map. I remember one time the bulb went out, and we stuck a piece of yellow chemical paper behind the finished drawing and put both into the black plastic drawing paper wrap, and then went outside in the sunlight, uncovered the papers briefly, covered them back up, and then went back inside to run them through the ammonia developer. It worked OK, but not great, but did the job we needed at the moment. We "engineered" a solution. We graduated up to a TRS Model 3 with those big 5-1/2" single sided single density floppy disks and learned the TRS operating system language for handling files. Later, I used an IBM PC with the 8088 microprocessor and learned the operating system dreamt up by some kid named Bill Gates who owned a company called Microsoft. And he had a wired hand thingy called a "mouse" when Windows 3,1 came out. I hated it at first, but learned to like Windows 95. It was awesome to get away from the keyboard using CAD and go to a stylus and puck, and then to screen toolboxes.
Our first company bought one of those Topcon total stations a few years after we used a Beetle mounted on top of a transit. We had to do some bridge stakeout work over the water when the Tenn-Tom waterway was under construction. We could not tape across 250 feet of water, and we needed a more accurate way to accurately stake bridge pilings and shoot in the alignment across the existing river. Our survey crews would fight over who got to use the total station for the day.
Oh, those were the days. I miss them, but I don't miss them. I really don't miss the rainy days when I was the only member of a 5-man crew that did not smoke, and I could either breath smoke and cough, or stick my nose out the window of the Suburban and drown. But I really do miss the comraderie of a bunch of guys who taught me a lot about surveying. And I also got a lot of "tales from the field" about the snake, the deer, the mad neighbor, the guy in overalls with a shotgun that asked what we were doing and letting us know "go down the line, but don't go over that hill right yonder." The crew could smell the mash cooking, but nobody said a word. Good times, memorable times. And we found an electric fence a few times, too, the back chainman always caught heck.
I am solo now, and it is quiet. I can think while I am working, and have most of the boundary solved in my head and know how to write the description before I get back to the office. I have changed with the times, and have the equipment I need to do what I need to do as efficiently as I can. I am 59, and I will keep working until I am tired of it or technology changes so drastically that I will just about have to start over with all new equipment just to keep going. "Old surveyor's never die; they just lose their directions."
Yea, About 2.4' At The Bottom
From memory.
Paul in PA
1982 K&E transit on non-adjustable tripod. Plum bob. 100' Highway chain (tape). Chaining pins. Range poles. Hand signals. I remember working with our first EDM. Party Chief had to also chain the distance because he didn't trust that new fangled EDM.
Another question is "When did you throw out your anchor"?
I know an old timer who still hand drafts. Does not have a data collector. And does comps on a HP 41 with the old infer red printer and roll paper. He's in his 70's and still does pretty good work.
Trimble 5603 with an early ranger and two 5700s base and rover. That was 11 years ago. Not all that different than what's out there now, although there was no network RTK and robots have improved a lot.
I started with total station/EDM, but i do still carry a plumb bob (used frequently) and i still know how to pull a steel tape properly. i still use corrections for temperature, tension, and sag. wrote the programs to my hp too.
Several years into this work, we found ourselves in a federal government construction project; there were more survey/field engineering parties than EDM's. It felt empowering to volunteer my EDM to another party and finish the project myself with a WILD T1A and 100' steel tape and 200' babbitt tape. I got the chance to teach an even younger instrument man 'the old way' and it turned out our building fit and closed as well or better than others in the contract. Good days.
Hey! I'm only 61, thank you very much. And, I didn't know that we knew each other. 😉 😀 😉 😀
Started at Army DMS (Defense Mapping School) 1999
1st - Wild T-2 & T-3's
2nd - Trimble 4000 Series static GPS
Didn't see a total station until I was downrange, didn't know what to do with it until I became a civilian again.
Left the military and go to university and what is the first thing they teach us? Steel tape and Gurley Transit. This was 2003.
I jumped in when EDMs were as awkward as I was. A Lietz transit and Beetle EDM. We quickly went to the Nikon DTM-4 and that's where I took off. I was the only one who knew how to use it. Had to teach everyone. Just punch in your vert, wait and change to horizontal.
I would not want to go backwards.
For me it was the calculations; started with a Bowmar Brain hand calculator, working my way up through all the iterations of HP hand calculators. Today I have regressed to the HP35-s. At around $60/unit I provide each new crewman with this calculator. The HP35-s has no I/O porting, you have to hand program equations at least once. The HP35 qualifies for sitting the exams.
bridge
Nate>>>At what mile marker did you get on? (A survey)
Most of the time, when one completes a survey, a tabulation is made and shared. Are you going to be doing that for us? Or one of your Nate Jr's?
We had a 2B when I started, but still used theodolite, auto-level, and chains (steel tape) regularly. I can even remember meandering creeks (big ones) with a transit that had the needle tuned to a traverse line bearing and we chained the creek and read the needle.
I started on a survey crew in the summer of 1989. Until probably 1998, we still surveyed lot jobs the old way with right angle mirrors and tapes. I remember one time in 1995, I left the battery on the 2B on when we went to lunch on a Friday. Well, after lunch, the battery was toast. The chief said "Hell boy, that thing will still turn angles" and we surveyed three lot jobs the rest of the day the old way. This was a two man crew and admittedly, they were easy lot jobs, but I never tried that again. That was the summer I turned 18.
I like having the FNG eat a piece of fruit he has never had before, a green persimmon. Leaves 'em puckered and smacking their lips for hours.
In college I got to use several older instruments in our labs. I used a Wild T2-A, a Nikon (which model number I forget), and even the Wild theodolite that had the 90 degree eyepiece for making solar and stellar observations. We had some GPS equipment at the college, but there were only like 8 or 10 satellites up and operating at the time. I remember making schedules for baseline observations for various projects that me and my classmates did. Setting up a base at 3 AM in the middle of nowhere and hoping that the people at the other end of the baseline had their stuff up and recording too.
I had a summer job while I was still in college and we used a Wild T1000 (was it the 1000? or a T100?) with the matching data collector. But we would still pull the steel tape (on a reel) out from time to time.
In 1994 I got on with a company and we used that same gun, but we had a T-16 as a backup. We would chain out a LOT (with the steel tape, not an actual chain) and I got quite skilled with my plumb bob. We took all our notes by hand for the first year I worked there. Then we got an HP48 with the SMI card as a data collector. That sped up both the process of topography and of construction staking.
I am glad that I was exposed to a lot of that equipment because it really did help me get my head around the reasoning and logic behind a lot of procedures that I still use.
