tketcham's latest activity

Here's a chart showing years of freeze over since 1816. You can see how the gaps between ice over are widening...

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...

Here’s one I still use, mostly for distances on irregular features (trails, rivers, etc). It is only obsolete if you’re into GPS...

Friday, June 17, 2022, Day 23 I was woken several times during the night by loud thunder and rainshowers. When I got up shortly after...

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...

Nice one. I’ve used them many moons ago at work. CAD kinda made them obsolete, although I have a cheap one for trip planning. Set it...

This is Dad's compass set, purchased when he was in college in the late 1940s. I used it during the first part of my own engineering...

Yes. Planimeters are very handy for measuring the area of vegetation types. I haven't used one in 30 years.

I remember using something like the above instrument in a basic cartography class. Somewhere in the basement I should have some of the...

Not photos of my father's originals . . . But when I was 12 in 1956, I was communicating with all of you at 5 WPM with this device...

That is cool as heck. Thanks for sharing!

Yesterday I found a local hardwoods supplier, in a nearby town. Nice fellow with a small sawmill. He has contacts and imports logs from...

So here's the manual... And how it sets up... And an example of how it works... Using this planimeter, which measures one square...

How about this. Not an object, but a skill - or more accurately, a language. At the beginning of the train service stage of my career...

I went from hand drawing units from stereo pair aerial photo interpretation and USGS topo mapping to using Autodesk AutoCAD and ESRI...