# From the Instrument Works of the AINM, Corran Hill — Catalogue for the year 1992

The Instrument Works issues this catalogue with its usual apologies for the waiting list and its
usual refusal to shorten it by hurrying. Every instrument listed here is made at the Works on
Corran Hill, where the Works has stood since the Institute's remove of 1988, and every one is
proved against the Institute's standards before it is suffered to leave the building. Prices hold
to the end of the year; the sea permitting, so do the delivery dates.

## The Ferrick Tide Clock

The pattern that has served the harbour tower of Port Ilvess since 1963, now in its fourth series —
taken up two years after the remove — and offered, as ever, in the harbour size and the house size. The movement is Ferrick's own
double-detent escapement with the tidal train geared for the purchaser's home port; ports of
unusual temper (the Fell Rocks among them) are respectfully declined. Each clock is run at the
Works against the transit series for one full lunation before delivery, and its rate card is
packed with it. The harbour size is priced at two hundred and forty skells, the house size at
ninety skells. The waiting list for either stands at just over a year, and the Works, which has
buried harbour boards and outlived their successors, recommends ordering early and complaining to
somebody else.

## The Saltglass Lens

Our Saltglass pattern doublet, the pride of the optical bench: a lens of uncommon flatness of
field, figured and proved at the Works for survey and chart work, and named — the Works is asked
weekly — for the green-edged gleam of its coated surfaces in a raking light, which the polishing
room achieved by accident in the first series and has been required to achieve on purpose ever
since. Supplied in the three survey diameters, in brass cells engraved with the proof date. The
Saltglass pattern was noticed at flattering length in The Meridian for the winter number of 1991,
and the Works has been catching up with the consequences ever since; the current wait is eight
months. Sixty skells in the smallest diameter; the larger two by quotation.

## Barometers, Marine and Station

The sealed marine aneroid, the station mercurial in the long case, and the recording pattern in
its travelling chest. Every barometer the Works sells is proved against the KSB before sale, and
carries its reduction card in the lid; the purchaser who loses the card may return the instrument
for re-proving at the price of the postage and a civil letter. The recording pattern is
commended to the attention of harbour boards with seawalls to defend; the Works names no names.

## Chronometers and Watch Proving

The Works continues the two-day chronometer in the gimballed box, and continues to prove any
islander's watch at the counter for the price of the tea drunk while waiting, under the clause of
the founding charter that the counter staff can recite in their sleep and occasionally do. The
mainland trade is reminded that the Works' chronometer certificates state the rate found, not the
rate hoped for, and that this is a feature.

## Sundries

Survey chains and bands, proved; thermometers graduated on the Institute's ladder, in the station
and the pocket patterns; sounding leads and lines; the tide-pole in three lengths; and the
Works' plain brass rain gauge, of which the Works will say only that it is the one instrument in
this catalogue nobody has ever returned.

Orders to the Instrument Works, Corran Hill, Port Ilvess. The Works asks correspondents to state
the home port with the order for any tidal instrument, and to state it correctly; the gearing
cannot afterwards be argued with, and neither, on this point, can the Works.
