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Good Day All,
With the help of a friend, I recently acquired a Stanley, London compass. Is there a way to date them?
Thank You,
Michael
https://www.milsurps.com/images/impo...UGrJziTl-1.jpg
https://www.milsurps.com/images/impo...19hQSArl-1.jpg
https://www.milsurps.com/images/impo...B7GBHhsl-1.jpg
It is not WW 2 as it has a NATO stock number on it.
I would like to add it to the CES for my L42A1 and wanted to find it if this would be correct for the timeframe.
If it is any help, the one in my L42 'CES' is in Mils (6400 'degrees' in the circle) and NOT degrees.
I have no idea if mine is correct or not, but my 4T has a 'degree' compass in the CES.
I believe that one of the uses of the 'Mils' compass was for directing Artillery fire so it may have been in the Falklands ?
http://www.compassdude.com/compass-units.php
I remember many years ago teaching a group of Boy Scouts orienteering at an international Jambouree - one group (From Norway) kept heading off in the wrong direction, after several aborted attempts I took a look at their compas and they had a 'metric' 400 degree compass so the cardinal pounts were 100 / 200 / 300 and 400, and not 90 / 180 / 270 and 360.
I subsequently found out that these are the Grad compasses
That's a slight conundrum; I enlisted in 1966 and we used compasses in Mils then and some years before that; in fact it was only around that time that the old 25 Pdrs were being converted to Mils as the army slowly moved into the metric age.
I also notice that this one is tritium lit and don't recall ours being tritium lit in 1974 when I used to have to take them out and calibrate them with a director, (a sort of super compass on a tripod for putting a battery of guns online) although we did have tritium lit aiming posts for the guns in those days.
My take on it is that some branches of the armed forces still required a compass in degrees for certain survey work, if I had to put an age on the compass I would probably say that was 1980's manufacture assuming that is a rubber base ring?
You could contact the company direct and ask them: pyser@pyseroptics.com
Regarding the L42 CES; I'm probably repeating myself but when we got issued two of them for Northern Ireland (1973) the rifle was taken out of the box along with the scout regiment scope (considered useless by the users in the OP's) and the sling was regarded as too complicated so the normal SLR sling was used. Compasses and bino's were securely locked away in case a young squaddie damaged them!
An interesting man and firm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Stanley_(inventor)
Finally closed down only in 1999.