Surveyor's Drawing

Sep 16, 2014 1 Replies

I have a surveyor's map of a property. Never having been trained on these things, I am having trouble understanding the notations. The property is irregularly shaped with many angles around the perimeter. For example, there is a point marked as 109 that corresponds to a known stake. From there, a line is drawn to the next point (110). The line is labelled N. 43^ 31' 00" W. 86.66' (The ^ character is actually a degree symbol).



The 86.66' seems correct for the distance to point 110. The rest seems to be specifying an angle, but how? Relative to North? Relative to the previous segment? I can't come up with anything that makes sense to me. The line is actually aiming roughly 110 degrees from true north (ie, ESE). All of the lines have that same format - an N or S followed by a degrees/minutes/seconds value followed by an E or W and then a distance in feet. Is there someone on this group who is familiar with this type of notation who can give me a hint?



Thanks, Pat



Never mind - I finally found it using Google. What had me tripped up was the point numbers seem to be going is reverse on my drawing. This is from a wikipedia article:

"For example N 38 00 00 E is 38 degrees into the northeast quadrant or

38 degrees east of north. Similarly S 22 00 00 W is 22 degrees west of south."

So mine is 38 and a half degrees west of north or 321.5 degrees. The other end of that line should be pointing 321.5 - 180 = 141.5 degrees. (My estimate of 110 degrees in my original post was way off. North is not up on this particular map so it was easy for me to guess wrong).

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