Deitzgen is the company that made my Dad's drafting set, too. There were enough pieces missing, though, that I bought my own set for college. Drafting was one of my favorite classes, but I never designed machine parts or buildings for my job. Instead, I used the dividers fairly often in forestry to quickly click off rough distances along a stream or road or skid trail (rather than using a map wheel) or for quickly seeing how far a stream or habitat buffer needed to be when designing cutting units. And the compasses were used to delineate buffer zones around critical habitat, nest sites, and other protected areas, or to see where the reach of a skyline yarder would be from a landing.
That's a nice one. The user defined scale entry would be handy because I often print my own maps but not always to a common scale. I have a cheap one that'll measure inches/centimeters and I have to convert to map distance.
I have (and love) all three- when drafting plans or reading blueprints on a site where there's no power or internet an engineer's scale and loupe can be invaluable, especially with drawings reduced from ARCHD or E-1 to A3 or A4, the tri-scale (really 6 scales) allows me to convert the scale to real-world dimensions, and my prismatic gridded loupe allows me to see and scale up items too small to see without it. Combining them with a folding scale (I have both a 6 and 12') allow me to accurately measure any surface using the sliding first section, even on vertical or or overhead spots where a tape measure just keeps collapsing on itself. of course I also have a set of compasses and dividers to go along with them
At the time I was in scouts, (1960's) to advance from second to first class rank, a scout had to demonstate a minimm knowledge of a set of more than a few code letters, a bunch more than just SOS. So much more than that has been dumbed down over the years until now.
But can you do it in semaphore?
I'll see your obsolescence and raise you one...
Well, while this pilot always carries not one, but two compasses on canoe trips, the FAA and aircraft manufactures actually do consider the compass as permanently superseded and unnecessary due to new electronic technology. I fly a Gulfstream GVII to pay the bills, and while it displays "magnetic direction indicators" in no less than seven places, there is not a single wet compass to be found.
An old guide once told me to always carry 3 compasses. One as my own favorite primarry, a secondary in case something happens to the primary, and a tertiary to give to some poor soul I encounter who has lost theirs. I actually have given two nicer compasses away, one to a local guy who guided me in the confusing mountain park trails on the north side of Seoul, South Korea, and another to a distant cousin I stayed with in my grandfather's tiny village home town in Poland.
How about a parachute? That level of technology screams “PARACHUTE!”
I still have a bunch of them packed away somewhere in boxes from our move last Fall. I'm not sure why I kept them in the move since I haven't used them since college in the 1980's and I was pretty heartless about throwing stuff away during the move. They just started excavating for my new shop yesterday and when it's done I'll go through my boxes once again and toss stuff rather than clutter up the new building.
