I'd forgotten to mention ...

To make matters even more confusing, in 2006 Fiskars, who owns Gerber Legendary Blades, bought Silva of Sweden, and placed it under the Gerber wing.

So now Fiskars/Gerber owns Silva of Sweden/Brunton of U.S..

Sheesh.

All my compass work has been in the midwest, so that might explain the lack of bubbles. When I went out west to Yellowstone I had my 15TDCL with me (I said I was trying to carry it more).

BTW, about the same time my 8099 had the bubble I found that my 15TDCL had stopped pointing north. Never figured out why. Brunton replaced it with a new one rather than fix it.

An a slightly different tangent, one thing folks who buy compasses should keep in mind (back to the original post) is that, at least in my view, they can have two basic roles: (1) to give a fairly general sense of direction (which way is north? for me this is usually when orienting a map), and (2) to provide relatively accurate bearings (following a bearing, or more importantly when using triangulation to determine your location).

Most any half-decent compass will do for (1), but for (2) I much prefer a good sighting compass. I've never felt very accurate doing bearings with a plain baseplate compass.