Weems Navigation Protractor

Quality product with a legendary brand name. Every boat should have one of these in the chart table, to be well understood, but probably ignored, as you navigate with GPS. :-)

Bought this and several other navigation tools for the ASA 105 class, this was by far the best/easiest to use and most accurate of them all. No moving it across the chart hoping it's still parallel to the bearing taken from the rose. You don't use the rose at all except to read variance; you line up the grid lines in the protractor wheel with either a latitude or longitude line then set for the desired course, including adjustment for variance, or measure a bearing working in the reverse of that process.

A good product if it is what you need.

This is a good, usable plotter if you have a chart table big enough to spread out a full size chart. But it is so huge as to be practically unusable on most sailboats -- takes up a large percentage of the chart table, is difficult to maneuver in tight spaces, Won't fit in the storage space available for my navigation tools. also it does not fit into the pockets of the Weems & Plath Navi-tote that I bought to keep nav tools in

Hard sturdy plastic with clear, easy to read numbers and symbols.

I ordered five of these plotters for a navigation class I teach because I have owned for 13 years, and still own, an earlier model, still labeled "255" but without the black knob. My plotter has withstood travel in an overfilled backpack, it has been squeezed and twisted, and is still functional as if it were new. Two out of the five plotters I ordered arrived cracked and had to be returned. For a third, which I am about to return, the protractor plus knob detached from the larger, rectangular ruler since the cheap brass rivet holding it fell off.Close comparison between my old plotter and one of the five I recently bought shows the following differences: 1) the black knob model is made of clearer, more transparent plastic than the older model, however the latter works just fine as far as lining up to meridians and parallels; 2) the plastic of the black knob model is about 2/3-3/4 as thick as the old one; 3) the plastic of the black knob model is brittle compared to the old model; 4) the black knob model plastic warps due to temperature changes; 5) the rotation of the protractor on the black knob model is not as smooth as the rotation on the older model; 6) the black knob creates a focus point on the ruler which can crack if pressure is inadvertently applied to the knob; 7) the black knob model has a brass rivet holding the knob to the ruler, whereas the older model has a stainless steel rivet.My guess is that Weems&Plath entrusted the design and production of the plotter to some new manager who decided that transparency of the plastic and saving a few cents on plastic thickness and other materials were the overriding goals. In the process, W&P sacrificed plastic qualities like robustness, resistance to bending and twisting, resistance to cracking, resistance to temperature variations and, for good measure, added a useless knob. W&P ended up with a product which does not even survive a few minutes of plotting in a classroom setting, and which would be absolutely unreliable in a marine environment.Don't buy it!

Exactly what I needed for navigation rally.

Arrived with the corner chipped off. I glued it back on with super glue rather than go to the trouble of returning. Other than that, it looks good and works well.