Hi Alex,

Your reconstruction of the series of mistakes and the narratives built upon them is compelling, and the somewhat dismissive attitude I have encountered in my enquiries over the shaft question deepens my suspicion that nobody has properly addressed the problem and simply repeats assertions flying around the net. But it is clear that the controversy can only be brought to an end by Gantenbrink himself. I have tried to find contact information but the only thing I could come up with was this -
[www.imdb.com]

Whether he is able to supply the survey data we seek, or is evasive, either way our question will be answered. But in the meantime is it not possible to use Gantenbrink's cyberdrawings to estimate the position of the exit of KC south shaft relative to pyramid centre?

You say - "It is quite expected that it [KC north] then deviates to the east in order to reach the required exit point". But the shaft 'entrance points' are different for the King's and Queen's chambers (for reasons that are completely unknown) and after the contortions required to avoid the Grand Gallery the shafts become straight, so that their exit points (or 'virtual' exit points in the case of the Queen's Chamber) are each at different distances from the north/south plane of the pyramid.
In the case of KC north why go so far to the west (almost to the pyramid centre) before abruptly becoming straight, and then reclaiming 'lost ground' to reach a putative exit point by veering to the east? There must be a good reason why, in this one case, the shaft has a different azimuth from the rest of the pyramid.
If the stellar target of KC north was Thuban it cannot have been when this star was on the meridian. At the conventional date (or I should say 'range' of dates, centering on about 2560 BC) Thuban is about one and a half degrees from the true pole, but we don't know the azimuth of the shaft to see if there is any correspondence - once again it comes back to Gantenbrink.

I am afraid I have no information about Tallet's dating. I must confess that when I read that 'Khufu died in the spring of 2483 BC' it brought to mind Archbishop Ussher's famous claim that the first day of creation was October 23, 4004 BC. Surely there must be someone who has read the book and can tell us what evidence Tallet used to establish the year date, this would be a very simple matter but I guess nobody cares much. But among those who are interested in the shafts there is an ongoing dispute - are they astronomical or geometrical, or neither? One should follow good evidence wherever it leads, including the 2780 BC correlation. (Even so it is difficult to reject the fact that the southern shafts, albeit approximately, match the altitudes of two stars central to Heliopolitan myth, Sirius and the belt of Orion).
And why has no useful information emerged from the much vaunted 'Djedi' project? Those involved would surely have had contact with Gantenbrink. But so far, as with all bureaucracies, 'it's crickets'.

I'll continue to make enquiries. You never know, either Gantenbrink is sitting on a pile of useful data, or someone might break ranks and admit that current notions are hearsay. We shall see.

Robin