The item is no longer in my collection, but shown for reference to potential buyers 'elsewhere'. Just to give you a professional opinion...

I did it, I willingly bought a fake instrument from India. Why? To check how good (bad) they are and to warn others (hopefully). Out of three choices, I chose the instrument that best resembled a real sextant thinking that if this one would be bad the others would be worse. These are for sale for anything between 75 and 100$ on Ebay but then you need to add import duties to them bringing them to around 100 - 125$ all-in. I bought mine without the box.

First of all the good. For the price you pay for it, it is not a badly made instrument. It also looks quite nice and if you have no clue what you are doing it almost seems real... Now for the bad. Where do I start... First of when I got it the mirrors and telescope were not screwed down very tightly. In itself that should not be too big a problem until you find that there is mm's of play around the screws messing up any set-up you will make. I also found that the sextant was as delivered way of from a correct set-up. Ofcourse you do not get a calibration certificate with it, but any decent engineering should make it sort of ok... It wasn't.

The first thing I did was rotate the mirrors in their holes in such a way that they were parallel and as close to an index error of zero as I could get them. The next step was the perpendicularity of the index mirror. As you can see from the photographs, it is obviously not perpendicular from its construction... As this was in the metal I could not easily correct this. So I adjusted the index mirror to compensate for this. Not an easy feat as in all their wisdom the mirror was designed with three adjustment screws with two on top. Completely the wrong way around; only one on the top would have sufficed. I first set the top two screws in such a way that the mirror looked optically parallel to the edge of the mirror ánd perpendicular. Then I used the bottom screw for finetuning. The screws are not easy to use as the slot in them is quite small.

Next step was the horizon mirror for both perpendicularity and index error. Again the same set-up with three screws. In this case the screws are in the right places but a new problem arose. The adjustment had to be quite big (I also corrected a bit with the index mirror) requiring the mirror to come out of the housing upon full correction. I did however manage to fully correct the instrument for all the basic errors.

Using the instrument is possible but not advised. The scale seems sort of OK; the drum does seem to make the correct number of rotations and the index is set to the correct angle. The main problem is the set-up of the mirrors which are slightly overlapping giving you a return image. A slightly smaller index mirror would have solved the issue. Or alternatively a higher power telescope. The magnification on the telescope is barely 1.5 as can be seen in the photographs (red area is same original photo size through the telescope; larger photograph is without magnification. There is little distortion in the image which is not very surprising considering its very low magnification.

Finally the filters are OK. They are in a peculiar set-up with two identically shaded (very light) filters and one much darker filter. They do however block the sun. I have not checked if they have any optical issues but from a quick inspection do seem to be OK and relatively perpendicular to the sight line. Finally, the handle which looks a lot like a real Tamaya handle has a metal plate on it which is engraved 'sextant', should you be in any doubt what sort of instrument this is. The metal plate has very sharp corners making the instrument awkward to hold.

So overall, the instrument is actually not bad for the money you pay for it. I would however seriously advise anybody against using it in anger...