WORST surveying equipment ever used

I knew before I saw you entire text what instrument you were going to describe.
The Jena was a pile of crap made in East Germany back in the day. I had my hands on one in 1978. When rotated, the bearings did not even feel smooth. Even the salesman did not push it.Bought a Nikon with a Beetle instead.

a rodman named Paul. On any given day I would have traded him for 3 aaa batteries.

> a rodman named Paul. On any given day I would have traded him for 3 aaa batteries.

^
this
:good: 😛

Topcon old stuff, optics were junk especially when I was used to Wild !

My boss took the 20" K&E in for repair. He came back with a loaner for a week or so. The horizontal scale had an inner scale from a 30" transit and an outer scale from a 20" gun. So the vernier didn't make sense at all. I could only read to the nearest 1/4 degree, as I recall. I did a lot of 90 degree offsets. One angle I had to measure I turned up 20 times to get the nearest minute. Of course it sat on a stiff leg tripod.

😀 😀 😀 😀 😀 That boy must've worked so hard at being useless that he perfected the art.

I worked for a small City in the 1990s. The City Engineer was cheap cheap cheap, you would think it was coming out of his own pocket.

He bought a used Sokkia Set 3 total station that had been owned by a Mine. That instrument looked like it had been used as a spare hammer. Never could get decent results out of it.

That cured me of wanting to use pre-owned total stations for a long time. Then a couple of years ago Caltrans gave us two S6 total stations that they were replacing with new, mine is in really good shape, it was well taken care of. They serviced it every year and now we do too. So my conclusion is, if a Surveyor owned it, it's probably okay, but contractor or miner instrument, no way.

>On any given day I would have traded him for 3 aaa batteries.
😀
A turn of phrase worthy of Uncle Paden himself!

John, it hurts to see others hurt too!!!

I worked for an outfit in White Rock, B.C. for a year and a half in the early 1990's that was extraordinarily cheap with equipment and supplies. For example, we had tripods with stripped footscrews. The legs had to be held clamped with vice grips, and you can imagine what those legs looked like. We had a RedMini top mount EDM on a mildewed 20 year old Sokkia theodolite. That EDM had a range, on good days, that was shorter than the 60m steel tape we carried. So we did most of our work with the tape. Which would have been okay if not for the many repairs in the tape. Every piece of equipment was jury rigged and patched up one way or another. I have lots of stories.

One day I asked for some keil, which where kept in a locked cabinet in the office. The boss pulled out one piece of keil and presented to me. I asked for another for my chainman. He took the one piece of keil from my hand, snapped it in half, and handed it back.

Meanwhile, there was a brand new Leica1010 total station sitting on the desk like an ornament. It went out in the field 4-5 times in the time I worked there. Performed like a champ.

When I left they complained that they couldn't seem to hang onto good help. Go figure.

Norman, that's the funniest thing I've read in a while!

Dad used to get a roll of flagging, strip off 30" piece for me, and 30" Piece for my brother, and 30" for himself, and PUT THE ROLL back in the truck for the NEXT day!

Yup, I remember!

N

I've worked for cheapos before. It's hilarious to look back on, but was flat frustrating at the time.

We had a Nikon transit that had the upper motion frozen. If you had to turn an angle, the bottom motion was locked on the backsight and the circle was read. You then had to add (or subtract) your desired angle to turn to.

We had a chain that had so many repairs if you ever actually pulled it to 15lbs., it would come apart.

The boss came back in one afternoon after driving by one of our jobs. He had a handful of 1 to 2 foot long pieces of flagging. He had salvaged them from the stakes we had set, because "we were using too much"...

I got real good at sitting down on rainy days with a small brush and little bottles of "Testors" model paint, black, white and red, freshening up the marks on a worn out Philly rod facing.

If you needed a pencil, the boss kept a shoebox with hundreds of 2" long shorties. Most of the erasers were either hard or gone. You had to sharpen them with a pocket knife because they were too short to fit in a hand sharpener. He was a chiseler too with the Kiel. He was convinced there was a conspiracy to take it all home and sell it on the black market...

We ran an account at a local gas station for gas and oil only. If we had a flat tire we had to convince the boss we had tried to fix it ourselves before he would ok the station to fix it. He griped constantly at the price of thirty-cent-a-gallon gasoline.

When I eventually started running my own shop I was surprised at how little money it actually takes to care for things like that. He was really putting undue stress on the crew by making us work with all that friggin' junk.

Live and learn.

> Dad used to get a roll of flagging, strip off 30" piece for me, and 30" Piece for my brother, and 30" for himself, and PUT THE ROLL back in the truck for the NEXT day!
That wasn't an issue with this place. We just didn't have flagging, except the few bits we tore off other peoples stakes. Or paint. Sometimes before we could do a stakeout we had to stop by the excavation we had staked the week before to recover enough lath to do the days work. We fashioned a lot of "lath" out of tree branches. Which is normal in the woods, but most of this work was in urban areas. We used concrete nails for traverse points which without paint or flagging where difficult to find, even moments later. I took driving them through pennies to help that a little. The boss complained about the waste of money. I pointed out that it wasn't his money, which only placated him a little.

You shouldn't have got me started. I've never lost a cheapo boss story contest yet.

I'll second the S3, piece of crap. We had the added joy of the button markings being worn off. We had to use a cheat sheet to remember which button did what. Thank goodness it was only kept as a spare while the others were in the shop.

The rodmen especially hated it, because it took so long to get a distance.

Edit, I looked on eBay and realize it was a Set2...

No contest. You had the cheapest boss that I have ever heard of. Now meanest boss I had one that would have to be in the running.

At least you got pencils Paden. I quit one job over a pencil. Still chaps me to think about it. I was told to leave my personal gear in his office. Nail bag, hammer, tack ball, folding tape, all that good stuff. I'd been taking it all home with me. He was so cheap that he sublet part of his office to a sheet rocking outfit and the first night I left my tools they were stolen. I was working for starvation wages and asked if I could be compensated so I could replace my tools. No. Those are personal items. Okay. I at least need a new pencil to write in the field book. No again. That's a personal item. Fine. Grabbed a ball point pen on my way out the door and used that in the field book. When he gave me grief about it, I exploded. I'm not even worth a freakin pencil to you. I'm not using any of my personal items on your jobs. Same jackwad gave me a Topcon 'Guppy' to topo forty acres when regular gun needed to go in for repair because it was falling apart. No data collector. Booked every single shot, horizontal and vertical and reduced them all on my 48. One of them folks who'd gladly spend a dollar to save a dime.

Between Norman and Paden, I am beginning to think that all the best "cheap boss" stories begin with, "somewhere in OK..."

Topcon GPT series.
Im a big Topcon fan but hate these guns. Used 2 different ones.Never doubled angles well. Made from light duty plastic. Real piece of sh*t. Probably why they dont make them anymore.

ONE of the cheap SOBs that I worked for years ago would not buy paint. He refused. But he did buy a pint of vodka (or more) a day.

When he was "twisting" he would drop us off at the job site, usually a topo, and leave under the guise of "running an errand". When he showed back up later in the day he would usually be knee-walking slobberin' drunk. Many times we had pushed him over into the passenger side and driven his baby-blue '62 Ford Galaxy Wagon back to his house and leave him passed out in the car.

We got finished on one of these days and he never came back. We hoofed to a pay phone and called his wife. She hadn't seen him either. One of the other (there were three of us) guys called a friend and we procured a ride.

As we were waiting for the new ride, drunk Charlie came rolling up and proceeded to pull off into a really deep and muddy ditch. We were a few hundred yards away and we just watched as he spun his tires and got stuck worse. We were loving it. He was so stuck he couldn't open a door. He rolled a window down and fell out. But he couldn't get up. As we watched a black and white rolled up and put Charlie in the back seat of the cop car. Our ride came and we left.

It took two days for his wagon to show back up in front of his house. We all acted like we didn't know what had happened. His wife was so pissed he was sleeping in the garage (where his drafting table was at) on a cot.

He cooled it a little after that. The real pisser was a week later two of us took the wagon to the car wash and got the baked-on gumbo out from under it. A real mess.

No paint, nope. But vodka, yes. :bored: