Creating Your Own Homemade Compass

[Hrusai]

amen to that jd1.....personally i think the adage of "one is none and two is one" is something everyone should live by.

and yes although we all hope we never lose our compass and dont need to improvise, if caught in a situation where we need to improvise, but dont have the knowledge, we'll kick ourselves for being dismissive, best thing to remember is, you can lose equipment but not knowledge. its always best to have both, if you got lots of fancy equipment but dont know how to use it, your screwed, if you got no equipment but know what to do, you've got a decent chance.

anyway thanks for this, personally i'd always keep a ready magnetised needle in my BOB ...you can always find a bit of floating wood or a puddle of water to use it in

[Lightspeed]

(3 July 2012, 11:05)Hrusai Wrote: amen to that jd1.....personally i think the adage of "one is none and two is one" is something everyone should live by.

and yes although we all hope we never lose our compass and dont need to improvise, if caught in a situation where we need to improvise, but dont have the knowledge, we'll kick ourselves for being dismissive, best thing to remember is, you can lose equipment but not knowledge. its always best to have both, if you got lots of fancy equipment but dont know how to use it, your screwed, if you got no equipment but know what to do, you've got a decent chance.

anyway thanks for this, personally i'd always keep a ready magnetised needle in my BOB ...you can always find a bit of floating wood or a puddle of water to use it in

Too true H

This thread has already doe its job, it has shared knowledge with our community.

One day in the distant future this little scrap of knowledge may be useful.

Until then I'm sticking to my Silva compass and the mini compass on the side of my Emergency Whistle..

BTW a magnet to get the whole process started can be made from scratch by placing a piese of steel or iron bar orientated north west under the centre of a good strong bonfire. The effect of the heat allows the magnetic poles in the atoms (?) to align and then fix in alignment when the metal is cold. We used to do this for fun when i was a kid.

LS

[Hrusai]

thats good to know LS! although it would be a weak magnet it should still do its job .....and yes the way a magnet works is



basically the metal has regions on roughly aligned atoms (cause all the atoms electrons interact with one another like a floating cloud of charge) and when you put a magnet next to a metal and heat it up all the regions in the metal can move because the metal goes liquidy and the atoms have room to move, so the magnet forces all the regions to align, and when that happens all the cumulative charge of all the atoms makes you a nice magnet

so its interesting to know that the magnetic field of the earth is strong enough to do the same thing! will definately have to try this

cheers LS