Sundials?

 Hi, I have a friend whose birthday is the first part of February. I like to make things for friends and relatives rather than buy something, to show how special I think they are. Plus I like making things. Most of the time I struggle to come up with the "right" thing. It usually means making it from stuff I already have.

   For Marie I decided to make a sundial. I had these 2 aluminum gears sitting around for years. Both were 10" x 1/4" and 50 teeth. I didn't think to make a blog about my sundials until I was well into the project so there are no early pictures.

   One of the first things I did was find out about marking the time on the dials. For this I found a website online; https://sundials.org/index.php/sundial-registry/selectdials/CA.html     It helped me realize that I could do a sundial and gave me help figuring out the correct degrees for the latitude I needed.

https://sundials.org/index.php/teachers-corner/sundial-mathematics

   So armed with that I found the latitude of Marie's home and measured and cut out a gnomon from 1 of the gears I had.

 

   On the other gear I had already laid out the angles for the hours and did a test fit of the gnomon.

    Partly because I didn't know what I was doing or had the proper tools for engraving the lines, things were often kinda off. But I persevered. I drew a circle to put the hour numbers in and bought a set of 3/8" number and letter stamps for marking them.

    I needed to center my circle compass for the proper look and I found the center of a hard drive gear fit the 1" hole perfect and it has a center dent for the compass to fit!

   Next came mounting the gnomon. I did a test fit and figured out I could do 2 screw holes through the bottom into the gnomon. I figured 10 x 32 would work cause I had a couple of those screw already.

    Well I drilled and tapped being very careful to get the holes aligned and careful of the tap in the holes to not break. So much for that I broke 2 taps..... I repositioned the gnomon and redrilled everything this time going with 1/4-20 . It worked out though I had to cut the nose off the gnomon to make it look nice.

    I did not get any pics of hammering the numbers in. It was very hard I'm pretty sure this is not just aluminum but some kind of harder alloy. When I was too soft on the first strike it was hard to line up the stamp and not do a double stamp. It was also difficult to cut the hour lines in. I wound up with a steel ruler and an ice pick doing multiple scratches to get some depth.

   Then came polishing. I went with 220-400-600-1000 and lastly with Brasso polish on a cotton wheel on my drill press. Took forever!

Finally I wrapped it up for her birthday. 

She loved it!

SUNDIAL PART TWO;

    Of course now I wanted one for myself.... I had a piece of 1/4 x 6" copper plate and I figured I could get 2 sundials out of it. So I laid out 2 circles.

This time with all my vast experience and knowledge.........I used a wood circle cutter mounted in my drill press to mark a 5.5" inner circle and drill and tap the center for a "stick" type gnomon.

These gnomon were made from 1/4" brass rod and shaped in my drill press with my dremel tool sanding drum. I tried cutting out the full size of the disc with the cutting tool but my drill press was not strong enough and kept stalling out.

    During this process I discovered that I could use my drill press to keep the holes and the tap aligned as the holes don't go through. I used the same trick to center the end of the gnomon in the die clamped to the press table to align everything. Worked a treat!

Next up was to mark the hour lines. 6am and 6pm were at 90° on the circle and noon 90° from them.

              Then using the numbers I got off the sundial website  I used a compass to mark them.

    Most were just tick marks so I could line up what ever engraving device on later.

    I marked all the hours and drew lines, leaving the outer circle empty for the numbers.

    At the bottom I used blue marker pen to make a place for the latitude these sundials are made for.

Then I went about stamping all the hour numbers at the top of the lines. Next I clamped a straight edge by the blue line and put in the latitude numbers.

    I thought I had all the hard work done. Then it was time to cut out the sundials....... My Dewalt jigsaw was a a piece o .......!  The blades kept falling out. I replaced the holder and had the same issue. I contacted DeWalt and there was/is no redesign of the holder. So I bought a cordless Ryobi! Most of my cordless tools are Ryobi so it fits for me. The Ryobi uses the T blades and they stay in. I used it to cut out the sundials.

Of course it wasn't perfect like a circle cutter would do. There was lots of sanding off the cutmarks and nubs.

I did get them cut out eventually. I really needed to engrave the lines in deeper as they might disappear during sanding. Making a jig on my drill press table to hold the sundial I was able to clamp a steel ruler and drag my circle cutter tip. now held in visegrips, across the lines multiple times to cut and recut the lines. This was the hardest part of the whole job and I did it twice!

       Then came polishing. I went with 220-400-600-1000 and lastly with Brasso polish on a cotton wheel on my drill press. Took forever!

    I gave 1 of them to my neighbor Lynn and kept 1 for myself. Not the greatest picture, here is mine on my back porch.

   One of the things I learned is that my property doesn't have a good safe place for it. My front yard is right along the street and this being solid copper would be an easy target.

Anywho a couple of fun projects!