My father was a surveyor. When I was young our house used to be where they would all congregate on Saturday morning. I've watched and listened to this ilk for well over 50 years and have come to some suprisingly positive conclusions.
One being that most surveyors are a lot smarter than they used to be. Most of us seem a lot more comfortable with the calcs and science of the profession. We have truly brought ourselves into the 21st. century.
A good example of 'non-intelligence' was an old party-chief of mine, Bill. He was a good surveyor by all accounts. He had a rigid work ethic and he held with good procedure, recognizing the difference between errors and blunders. I learned a lot from that old man.
But he had no math skills past simple arithmetic. He used to check cuts and fills figured on a hand held calculator with a pencil and paper.
We kept a 12" square piece of plywood in the truck. This was placed on the ground when it began raining. Once someone could count 12 drops appearing on the plywood, we boxed it up. His reasoning: "That's one drop per square inch...."
The only way we would run a curve was to chain EVERY station from the PC...His reasoning: "There's two points that are on line and the same 'chord' from the last station"...(These words really came outa his mouth.) He was lost without his trig and curve tables.
While Bill was not a rocket scientist, he was a successful surveyor for his time. The recent post about the 1875 title and the 1942 pipes got me to pondering about all the monuments he set in his career with just a rigid and very rudimentary understanding of plane geometry. There's a bunch out there. Are they in the right place? If they're still where Bill set them, then they are.
Given the same information today, most of would probably disagree with some of his 'fuzzy' math. But as surveyors we should still honor the work of the one whose footsteps we're following. Most of the monumentation of property done in the 19th. and 20th. centuries was done without the tools we enjoy today. I admonish all surveyors to keep this in mind while performing a retracement.
Here's to you, Bill...and that dumb piece of plywood you kept in the truck.
:good: :good: :good: enough said!
Don't believe the bunch we have today are a bit smarter than those who went before. Same race, different needs, tools and experience. Many things the old timers did daily we can't do without study and then we would probably make some wrong assumptions caused by our superior knowledge getting in the way of logic. Was a time when I thought the old timers were dumb, the dumb one turned out to be me, for thinking so.
jud
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> Here's to you, Bill...and that dumb piece of plywood you kept in the truck.
:good: :good: :good:
And thumbs up to you for posting this
:good:
> ...Most of the monumentation of property done in the 19th. and 20th. centuries was done without the tools we enjoy today. I admonish all surveyors to keep this in mind while performing a retracement.
With that in mind, I bet that most pincushions we encounter nowadays were set in the past 20 or so years. About the time radial staking became the rave to soon be followed by GPS - and we became better than that old guy. Really sad
Great post Mr Cash! Cheers... :beer:
Wayne
You're probably right. I remember being on a crew in 1972 when we set a center of section, after a week's worth of boundary work. The PC set a 36" piece of threaded pipe with a threaded cap (from the hardware store) with "center sec 14" stamped into the top with our dies.
This was all done with chain and transit. We not only chained into the section a 1/2 mile (on a 15' offset to avoid the quarter-line fence), we chained back out, continuing on our bearing. We calc'd a bearing-bearing intersect and everything fit fairly well. I remember the section closure was 1:12000 or something close to that. The section had well monumented Highway Dept. brass at most of the corners.
Anyway, a number of years later I was in the same area (it had developed beyond anyone's wildest guess) and pulled the corner references from the library. Someone had set a 1/2" rebar at the "True Center of Section" that was about 1.5 to 2 foot south and west of that capped pipe. They noted the existing pipe on their reference sheet, but apparently felt it was inaccurate enough to set one in the 'right' place.
I just laughed to myself. First, I'm pretty proud of our chain work to get that close...and my second chuckle was that an entire 160 acre subdivision had been built off of the capped pipe. The other surveyor was so focused on setting the center of section in the 'right' place that he ignored an almost 1/2 mile long line of property pins (every 60 feet or so), that pointed at the pipe.
When I used to work in the Tucson area during the mid 80's, I drew a "square inch" with the marker on the inside of the windshield. If too many drops fell in that square, then we boxed it up. Didn't happen too often....
> I admonish all surveyors to keep this in mind while performing a retracement.
>
> Here's to you, Bill...and that dumb piece of plywood you kept in the truck.
Amen!
Here is a bit of wisdom from an old Arkansas Surveyor:
Ase asegn oduuslm twd ndbbpgn fdbbdw tgr fdbbdw tb hdtmewpgn fdblddg bls zspgbm feb lswmd tgr lswmd tb vgslpgn lxtb bls zspgbm bs hdtmewd fdblddg.
Ha Hdgbsw, T. K. Wsfpgmsg
-- ------, A. -. --------
(A hint)
What did the X stand for?
> What did the X stand for?
LOL...x is h
DDSM:beer:
and b is for beer...or T as in Tom...;-)
I was talking about the K that my secret decoder ring said stood for the initial X 🙂
Who In The Hell Stops Surveying Cause Its Raining?
It rains (or used to) all the time here in the Texas Gulf Coast (50-60 inches a year is not unheard of...) but most survey party crew members I worked with and certainly not myself would even think of shuting it down unless the rain was torrential, windy or there was danger from lightning and thunder.
A five foot T-Post and golf umbrella with about six feet of bailing wire, staubed in the ground in just the right spot over the total-station and the instrument man, is all a survey crew needs to continue surveying in the rain.
I would tell my guys that the rain was God's way of cooling us down from the stiffling heat and to let the rain fall over their heads, like eagles nesting on mountain tops. Most bought it, others didn't, but the guys that refused to get wet, never lasted long on my crews or the surveying business in general.
Of course there were rain outs. Houston/Galveston is considered sub-tropical, but for the most part, the summer rains never lasted too long... certainly not long enough to shut it down for the day.
I used to love the feeling of surveying the Gulf Coast summer rain.
Who In The Hell Stops Surveying Cause Its Raining?
Only two things come from Houston....and I dont see any horns on you 😀
What's The Other?
Thing that comes from Houston that is.
Was the earlier post too descript for a North Texan, i.e. Southern Oklahoman? I mean North Texans ain't really considered Texan... is they?:cat:
AS3
>
> Oh my .what two points is he measuring there? 😉
Looks like he found the TRUE POINT OF BEGINNING!
DDSM:beer:
All I can say is that I am in awe of that fine pc of writing. I recomend that be read from the pulpit. (Where's Larry Phipps...)
Excellent.
Nate
> All I can say is that I am in awe of that fine pc of writing. I recomend that be read from the pulpit. (Where's Larry Phipps...)
>
> Excellent.
>
> Nate
Nate,
I remember having a phone call from an old Arkansas Surveyor...back in the days when I sat on a 'certain lumber company's drafting chair'...I tried to preach the manual...but the old man schooled me...
I held the old notes of O.E. Banks...Floyd Weaver...Simeon A. Pintado...
Old Fred taught me a thing or two...and he did you too...
DDSM:beer:
(never mind the beer...say 'hey' to the family)
Isn't Arizona like Southern California? When it rains it dumps in buckets, they call it a cloud burst. Usually it lasts for about 10 to 15 minutes then the sun comes out again.
Wayne
I know that is crazy. Maybe in 200 years surveyors will argue over which molecule on top of the rebar is the "true" center.
There is nothing more important in Surveying than monuments; we set monuments not as an exercise in who can measure the best but as a means for the property owners to know where their boundaries are located. Once the monument is set and it is accepted and used by the property owners we shouldn't be disturbing that.
Our files are full of old traverse sheets. They made more mistakes than you would think. I have had occasion to re-run their calculations and I usually find some blunder or other. They didn't have computers, it was all done by hand and they had time constraints just like us.
One of the best (and meanest) crew-chiefs I worked under was a high school dropout.
I once asked a mentor (licensed PS) who I most admired which school it was he had gone to (MI was 1st state to require a degree), and he replied without any condescension 'the school of hard knocks' - he'd been grandfathered in. I find it interesting that nobody since then, no matter what their pedigrees, come close to the character of these two individuals in my history in this industry.
