1965 Wild Heerbrugg NK10Together with the 1965 Wild NK01 the instrument shown here is a bit of a stranger amidst the collection. Whereas most of the optical geodetic instruments in the collection either come from the high-end of the spectrum or have been playing an important role in the development of them in general, the NK10 is a small engineer's level for tasks requiring medium accuracy. Together they were however the first two geodetic instruments in the collection and as it is nice to have the whole 'baseline' of levels from the N0 up to the N3 that Wild Heerbrugg created over the years justifies their presence. In addition to that they are coincidentally the same age as I am. Development Just like with the theodolites Heinrich Wild started building levels with model number 2. The first theodolite Wild produced was thus the T2, while the first level he produced was the N2 (or rather NII as Wild used Roman numerals for the levels in the early days). From these instruments he first stepped up to even better instruments as the T3 and the N3 before developing instruments with lower accuracy to facilitate a wider market. Accuracy Being an engineer's level one can not expect the highest accuracy from it. The telescope has a 20 times magnification with a 100 times stadia constant for the stadia hairs. The horizontal vial has an accuracy of 60" per 2mm run which, thanks to the coincidence method, can be levelled with an accuracy of 1.5". As a result of this a 3 millimetres standard deviation for a kilometre double run can be achieved. The instrument When the instrument came complete with its original case but was in a sorry state when it arrived. Luckily enough it came together with another NK10 that provided several parts to restore this one and the 1965 Wild NK01 in the collection. After restoration the instrument has been used in the field for several years before it was replaced by a more modern Wild Heerbrugg N1. If you have any questions and/or remarks please let me know. |
Surveyor's crosses... Geodetic Sextants... Theodolites... Total Stations... Levels... Standards... Tools... Firms...
20th c. hydrostatic level 19th c. water bottle level 19th c. Secrétan Egault 19th c. Tibaut Lenoir 1928 Carl Zeiss Nivellier I 1926 Wild NKII 1924 Carl Zeiss Nivellier II 1948 Wild N1 1932 Carl Zeiss Nivellier III 1951 Wild N2 1965 Wild NK01 1965 Wild NK10 1961 Wild N3 1970 Wild NK2 1977 Wild N3 1999 Wild NA2-GPM3 20th c. Cowley 1960s Zeiss Opton Ni 2 1960s Jenoptik Koni 007