The Best Made Lensatic Cruiser Compass Handbook (Part 1)
The following is an excerpt from the handbook to The Best Made Lensatic Cruiser Compass.
The Best Made Cruiser is a style of compass termed a “Lensatic Compass” that is historically considered to be the most accurate and ideal for both layman and professional use. Among other exciting features your compass is equipped with a lensatic or prismatic sight, which will allow the user to read a bearing off the compass while simultaneously aligning the compass with their destination and or objective. The lensatic style is optimized for explorers, geologists, speleologists, archaeologists, ornithologists, the military, and most famously for foresters who “cruise” timberlands engaged in precision survey work. This compass is a tool that will enable you to determine your location in the field, direction to landmarks or destinations, estimate distances, and find points of interest (marked boundary lines, USGS markers, trail heads, buried treasure, etc.). Your compass is a delicate precision instrument and must be cared for and used accordingly.
The Best Made Cruiser consists of a metal housing and lid with a glass window and a sighting or lubbing line etched into it. The spherically ground glass prism is mounted in a robust hinged housing unit that is flipped 180° and moved up or down which allows the user to focus on bearings. You can sight your objective by simultaneously observing the dial through the observation slit and the lubbing line in the glass window. The dial, lubbing line, and destination will simultaneously appear in your field of vision when you hold the compass level, and with some practice you will soon be able to determine the direction of travel. The compass has an integrated spirit level and can be mounted on a tripod by means of the threaded fitting in the base which will help serve as theodolite for simple terrain surveys. As a lensatic compass it offers considerable advantages over lesser models whereby parallax errors are more likely to occur. Excellent damping of the dial system ensures rapid and precise reading to a fraction of a degree.
In the following days we will outline more specific techniques to using the Cruiser including how to take bearings, determining your position in the field, and understanding magnetic declination.
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