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 tha has been dumbed down over the years until now.
But can you do it in semaphore?
