Question about land surveying

[Highbeam]

I just did this. I located my corners pretty well in dense northwest jungle. My lines were longer, two 660s and a 1200. The 1200 was my hardest line. I cleared from one point to the other and ended up almost entirely on the neighbor's property in the middle, my road curved. Here's my advice. Don't cut down any trees to clear the line. The value of the trees causes trouble. Just clearing a path through the brush shouldn't upset the neighbor or at least if it does he can't sue you for the value. Connect the pins with a trail/road. Go back and refine if necessary.

I built the perimeter road wrong and the surveyors came in to set the corners and give me correct line points every 200'. With the line points all I had to do was sight down them to make a nice straight road along the correct P-line. The surveyors heavily used and depended on that first trail even though it was on a neighbor's property.

For 450' I would get a tall stick 20' of plastic PVC white pipe and paint the top bright pink. Set the pipe up and hopefully you can see it from the other corner. If not, set up both corners this way and go to the middle and try and see both. It is easier to see the pipe if someone waves it back and forth.

 

[Jagmandave]

Wow, that's a great idea about the pipe. I have a 350 ft line I need to check and mark and the trees keep me from seeing the uphill part. I'll have to try this!

 

[Highbeam]

I was a chainman for a survey crew and when we did topographic surveying of a forested parcel there was a need to get a grid of points with say 20' between points. So I would trudge through the woods with a topo-rod. A topo rod is an expandable white plastic rod with a prism at the top. The topo rod extends to 25' tall and the party chief running the gun would aim at the prism at the top of the rod to get the shot. The less times we moved the gun the better so I would try my best to be seen.

As I became educated, I became the party chief and ran the gun. I would have the chainman go out there into the jungle and wave the rod so that we could do the survey. After a bit of practice you could pick that prism, and the rod, out pretty well.

Depending on the trees, you could try and find a distinctive tree at one corner and head towards it from the other corner.

My experience with GPS is very poor since the dense jungle did not allow the GPS units to see the sattelites.

 

[MikePA]

When my FIL and I ran a topo, all we had was a transit and a topo pole with markings on it. /forums/images/graemlins/frown.gif No prism and no 'gun'. /forums/images/graemlins/frown.gif /forums/images/graemlins/frown.gif

 

[HomeBrew2]

Oh, your FIL had a "gun" too ... transit, total station, theodolite, are all "guns". I haven't heard of much stadia topo being done for some time. I never did any in 20 years of party chiefing but did do one in the hills for my senior project at Fresno State. It's a great way to do topo as long as it's for dirt work, and it's cheap but does generate a bunch of paperwork after the fact. /forums/images/graemlins/smirk.gif

 

[MikePA]

We had a transit and a theodolite, I thought by "guns" you meant one of the laser devices. We were running topos with stadia poles (thanks for reminding me what it was called) a lot longer than 20 years ago. /forums/images/graemlins/tongue.gif

 

[HomeBrew2]

Kindof interesting thinking of the old stadia methods ... all the original USGS quad sheets were compiled from stadia surveys ... the currently publically available DEM's (digital elevation models) were created from digitized quad sheets (with the exception of photogrametric updates after WWII) ... the results of those old methods are still with us today, just in a different package

 

[Highbeam]

The "gun" in my case was a total station which does in fact use a laser type system to measure the distance directly to the prism. Every "shot" you take with the "gun" results in an x,y,z coordinate. A whole bunch of shots can make a pretty fancy contour map.

Now we have robotic total stations. They use motors to drive the gun so that it follows the prizm as you move. I send a single guy out to do topo surveys now. The one man crew has a fancy topo rod equipped with a key pad to fire the gun with.

 

[beenthere]

Are you near the Longhorn Cavern State Park?

 

[HomeBrew2]

Very cool!!! I, for one, knew of the type of instrument you were talking about. Unless you had a quite specialized total station though, I would think it's distance measuring module used infrared rather than laser hence, no visible, focused light.

I wound up doing more construction staking, cuz I was unlucky enough to be good at it, than topo but, still several thousand topo's with old 1" Topcon total stations. Does the rodman's data unit allow much communication for left-right / come-go info for stakeout on the robotic system?

I've been thinking of renting one of the robotics to topo my place. Do you happen to know what they rent for? Any experience with the prism-less total stations?

Really neat that you have access to the equipment when it comes time to fence your "jungle". Having the ability to run a random traverse from corner monument to corner monument then backtrack and do bearing/bearing intersections to set line points where visibility allows is the only way to do that job right. I was able to pickup a little pocket change running line for neighbors. I only set line points from found monuments cuz I wasn't licensed but did verify the monuments vs. plat map in 2 directions so as to not pick up an erroneous offset or meander monument. I always set points and lath that were intervisible with 2 others so the homeowner AND his neighbors could always see 3 points on the line. That way they could follow them from one corner to the other and I also had a check on my work.
Cheers!