Kid comes to pickup a riding mower. Ok, first 'fun' was squeeeeeezing it into his Toyota van, then the real fun.

Asks how to get to the highway. Hmm he just came from there, but drove here from the south ! Seems his phone saw a closed road and took him on a 'ride in the country'..sigh.

I said, 'EASY, up to the school, turn right, then left, then right at the lights'. You can SEE the hwy from my place,sigh. I had to say the shpeel 6-7 times as he twothumbed it into his phone. Kinda wondering if he ever made it home !!

City repaved my road 3 years ago..raised it, now 1,000s of gallons of their water race through my old property,new owner ain't happy with the friggin LAKE that forms EVERY rainstorm....NO 'instruments' were used during roadwork ! No fancy GPS gizmo, no theodolite, no transit, not even a tape measure..and it took 9 guys and 2 gals to repave 1/2 my driveway 5 months later to almost get rid of the 4" high 'mini' lake....

sigh...

One good EMP blast and 1/2, no, 3/4, naa 90% of the World's population will be useless cause their 'smart' devices won't work....

One good EMP blast and 1/2, no, 3/4, naa 90% of the World's population will be useless cause their 'smart' devices won't work....

I would like to see that happen, if not for entertainment reasons only.

Working with some middle 20's dumbasses that can't walk 75' to the bathroom to take a 30 min crap without having there head buried in there phone.

I know I would be alright.

Back the the original discussion.

 in the late 60s and early 70s I drove semi and delivered all over Chicago only had a paper map from AAA to get around, load in Ohio and head west be there in the morning. Run all over the United States with nothing but a paper map.

 Since current humans don't know if they are a F or M how could they know N, S, E, or W.

Interesting because of what I was doing on Sunday.

My Sunday Funday task was to use my new Bosh automatic optical level

(GOL32) to check a 300x120 field for level. An automatic level has mirrors or prisms that compensate for slightly out of level set up. You just need to get the tool manually level enough so that the compensator device doesn't run out of travel. I am a bit of a klutz-tripping over the tripod, problems focusing and finding the stick. Hey, the sun got in my eyes.

From set up #1 in one corner, 1 sighted in 4 corner posts, made marks on each post

to the cross hairs. I used a yardstick clamped to the post, noted the number, walked over and made the mark.

Then I moved to the center of the field for set up #2. I repeated the process, 4 more marks. If the level is good, then the distance between #1 marks and #2 marks should be identical. I got 14.25 to 14.75. So 1/2" variance. I guess that is ok to check level of a garden plot. So all that was just to confirm the level wasn't broken and get ready to take the contour measurements. Then using the 8ft grade stick I checked 21 points. Did it myself with grade stick clamped to a saw horse. Now I know the field is 23" out of flat. Slopes down going south. This corresponds to puddles when it rains hard. Google Earth showed the same direction of slope. They only give 1ft resolution readings.

That was a fairly nerdy activity, the kind of thing I enjoy because it is interesting. Something my father would have done with the kids, just so we would see the process.

Then I got to wrenching on the tractor, replaced the canister type oil filter head for a spin on type. Worked out well.

Amazing how well the old timers did in surviving the west with the mountains and the brush.

Ray, It was about $290, I had a $20 coupon applied. Amazon. A kit, with tripod, grade stick, level and case for the level head.  Not used for work. I guess I collect tools.

THEY WEREUNDERGROUND STEVO !!!!!!! Pretty sure I mentioned  TUNNELING  !!! You can read ALL of the words in a post ??

Thank you for the link Les , thank goodness some of us can read a post  !!

How did they get a "line" through a mountain ?? I wished the show went into a little more detail the other night  .

Hey guys, if I center punch a hole and drill 4 inches to the side is my hole in the right spot?

God lord Freed, my guess would be they survey a line over the mountain and luckily there was more than one transit in the world back then, so they set a transit on each side and someone looked through it to make sure the center of the tunnel was on the line.

That means the surveyors were in the whiskey bottle too long.

Actually all BS aside I worked for a surveyor in college and we we're looking for quarter corners in Liberal KS  for a housing subdivision.  At the same time they were redoing Kansas Ave. through town and the contractor failed to file endangered quarter corner report, so we were at the court house raising hell and they brought us every book they had. The surveyor I worked for always told me he didn't know how anything was straight in this country because surveyors were the biggest drunks around.  Well as we were going through the books, wouldn't you know it right there in the survey reports he had noted that he placed a whiskey bottle beneath the corner rock!  Nonetheless we ended up two miles outside of town to find a second corner and the rock we're trying to find  with the whiskey bottle was long gone so I can't tell you if the bottle was full or empty.

and don't get be started on measuring sewer depths for a housing subdivision,  I still have nightmares about what I saw.

Thanks Dusty, some of these cat's think they have ALL of the answers, maybe they can get on a WH cabinet position 

I awake EVERY morning @ 5:15-20 (EST)  without an alarm clock, get to a job site and put 8-10 hours in/ day !! I don't sit around like you "wondering" about fellow posters   !!

Gassy built it?

Maybe, just maybe you should look at a transit, then you'd understand how you can make a curve.

I doubt this will help but hey it's worth a shot, this is the base of a fairly old vintage.  The confusing part would be one turns to the left on one side and one turns to the right on the other, but that starting point is still that same straight line.

  

That's funny, there's a reason you always see them bending over to look thru them with their hands behind their back.

The most idiotic thing we ever did was shooting elevations for a flood plain in a town that hadn't seen the river run since they built the John Martin but there is always that chance and when you do that you have to go to a known point of elevation and transit your way back.  The funny thing is we had one of those "at the time" fancy computer transits but when it came to that we had to get the stick and old reliable out to make certain we were right, otherwise you could take that new computer and shoot over 6 hills 5 miles away and go with what it said, but on a flood plain, no sir we did it the old fashioned way.  Of course that was 30 years ago so probably just go with the old reliable Garmin today.

To drill a hole from both sides, start by standing on TOP of the mountain, and look at the approach and departure point on each side.  MOVE to a point directly ABOVE where the tunnel will pass.  From there, set your transit.  Establish TWO markpoints, one on each side, that are 180 degrees opposite, and mark the azimuth and elevation from your position, on your chart.  Place a markpoint on your position, that will be equally visible from the two distant markpoints.

Now move to one of the distant markpoints, set up your transit, and set up on your mountaintop marker.  Set your transit elevation DOWN to your desired entry point, and measure the downset angle.  Set markpoints on the mountain face entry point... and place a pair of markers in DIRECT LINE of the entry point, that create a 'gunsight'.

Repeat for the other end.

Start digging at the mountain face.  As you proceed inward, carry in your mousehole gauge.  The mousehole gauge is a stick 4ft high, with a stick 8ft wide on it.  Each time the tunnel gains another 10 feet, place the gauge at the end of your tunnel... short stick on the ground, long stick against sides.  At the center of the gauge is a hanger for your lantern.  Your guiding officer will look through the aperture in the 'gunsight', and if your lantern's light is too low, too high, too left, or too right, he will TELL you which way to go.

This is how a straight-bore tunnel is accomplished from two sides... and realize- the tunnel starts as a 'mousehole'... just dug far enough to get IN and THROUGH.  As the 'mousehole' is dug, narrow-gauge temporary rails are set to facilitate rolling in several hand- or mule-pulled carts for carrying out spoils.  Once all the way through, the walls are expanded to make the full-size tunnel.

For a curved tunnel, the charts are interpolated over the curve such that at X distance in, the gunsight needs to reflect a 'drift left' or 'drift right' by a certain distance.  Initially, this will be done by observing the change in position of the gauge lantern, but as the curve passes visibility, a new marker is placed at a known point in the tunnel's depth, an d the new angle is set with a transit.

ONCE the tunnels are within 60-70ft of eachother, one crew will silence, and a stethoscope operator will probe the endwall and listen for digging on the other side, and by angling the probe, determine wether a slight adjustment is necessary to intercept the other side.  Doing this from both sides assures that eventually, one crew's mousehole will meet the other crew's mousehole...

and once they do, opening up to full tunnel diameter assures that any lack of alignment will NEVER be noticeable.

The prevailing thought of most people nowdays, is that modern electronics are somehow superior to old methods, and while they MAY be 'more convenient', they do not have any assured superior accuracy, and in many cases, they present LESS than so-referred 'antiquated' methods.

The foundations of accuracy come back to very simple principles...  Geometric features of lines, planes, and triangles.

There are really only TWO thing you can truely depend on...  Gravity, and Triangles.  (Cats not so much).

The concepts of dimensional accuracy depend solely on triangles.  Surveying is nothing more than establishing reference points, and using lines to describe positions in a plane, which is, of course, the feature of a triangle (two points defines a line, three points defines a plane).

Surveyors use gravity (a level) and a magnetic compass (reference of azimuth) to HELP in the process, but there are circumstances where a magnetic compass is NOT effective, and there are circumstances when gravity isn't entirely practical (placing a water level on either side of a mountain, for instance). 

One could say that an old-fashioned surveyor's transit is 'crude', it's actually just the opposite, and I'll present a proof of this:

When I turn a piece of metal in my lathe, I can measure it with a ruler, or a vernier caliper, or a dial caliper, or a digital caliper, to check for variations of anywhere from an inch, to a tenth, or a thousanth, or a hundred-thou, and these tools will reveal it.

If I place a light source at one end of the part, and I stand at an angle on the other end, and look at the reflection of the light, I can SEE WITH MY EYES... a variation of that surface dimension, to less than one hundred-thou, and if I place a straightedge so that it shadows my light, I can see a deviation of a MILLIONTH.

That's just simple physics... it's triangles, and my measurement medium is LIGHT.

What else uses LIGHT as a measuring tool?  A laser...  but how do they do it with the laser?  Usually, with reflectometry and chronography... they send a pulse of light across a distance and measure the TIME it takes to make the trip.  It ASSUMES the amount of travel time is predictable (not necessarily) and ASSUMES that the timing mechanism is accurate (certainly not), so there's plenty of room for accuracy issue there...

Which doesn't mean a new method isn't capable of EQUALLING an old method, it just cannot be 'superior' in any form other than convenience.

Its like you carrying a pocket calculator... you can do math with paper and pencil, and in many cases, you can do it to greater precision than a digital calculator, because the CALCULATOR must convert to binary, which includes ROUNDING, while a human (because they are naturally ANALOG) can easily work with fractions that are NOT roundable (like 1/3rd) and numbers which aren't RATIONAL numbers (like square root of 5).

When they bored holes through mountains, they used tools and techniques which relied on simple geometry, and utilized optical measurement of electromagnetic radiation, to prove that geometry.  IMO, that was high tech...

Any use for a plumb bob here? How to get them steady when it is windy?

I watched the neighbor's surveyor hack through brush and briars and ticks.

I don't know about mountain work, winter also, yikes.

new house built nextdoor ( yeh, contractors....)

The builders use them fancy  computerized transits( whatever they're called)..

.form and pour the house with attached garage...

week later farmers come.. use a chalk line to layout the sills....

entire house isn't SQUARE and the garage wall is off 'just' 6 friggin INCHES in 22'..

heck even me, the '4 eyed nosey neighbour' could SEE that wasn't even close to being straight and parallel to the house wall....

as for plumbob.... heavier is better and areodynamically shaped. Friend 'redid' his, added a small 'thrust washer' setup so next to no interaction between the string and the plumbob.

I use a plumb-bob, and wind is NOT a critical issue... a plumb-bob is a pendulum, and as such, it swings at a frequency determined by the distance from the hanging point (just like a clock), to the bob's center of gravity.

When a plumb bob swings, finding the centerpoint is not difficult- just watch it swing, and mark the extents.  Draw a line between the two, and mark the center.

The other way, is to dampen the swing by allowing it to drag a smidgen 'till it settles down.

If it's a constant wind, and you're concerned with lateral drift from that breeze, just pull it out, and let it swing.  It will swing in all directions, mark the extents in all directions.  With a constant wind, the extents will form an oval, as the wind only affects one plane, right?

The oval will be widest at plane 90 degrees to the wind.  Draw a line through the widest point, mark the center.  Now measure the RADIUS of that centerpoint, and rotate it 90 degrees, and mark the upwind, and downwind side.  You'll see that the markpoint is SHORTER on the downwind side, and LONGER on the upwind side.  This distance will be equal on both sides, and is the total distance of wind-drift.  Measure that distance, and mark a point that distance INTO the wind, from your centerpoint.

Same way, they just didn't have magnification using lenses, they just used sticks and drew lines on the ground.  They used a torch, instead of a lantern, and again, started small, and opened it up once through.

Cutting large stones... there's LOTS of technology that is somewhat forgotten by today's standards, but there's some parts still used.  Here's ONE of the techniques, and it's still a common process, but using modern materials:

Weave a piece of rope.  Back then, they used common rope... sisal, manila, or hemp... dipped in whatever sticky, gummy material they could find (tree sap was popular, but natural surface tar too), and then they rolled the sticky rope in pumice or other type of crushed lava.

Lay the rope across an area of stone to be cut.  Pull the rope back and forth, and dribble water on it.  It will cut through most stone very well.  Another way to do it, is to make a treadwheel, and make the rope endless, wrapping around the treadwheel exterior.  Walkers (human or animal) inside the drum provide power to pull the rope out to a return pulley, then across the stone, like a giant chain-saw, but using the abrasive rope.

The cut is very straight, because the rope is ALWAYS taut (if it wasn't, it wouldn't cut!).