This Sundial is designed for easy viewing and will work at any latitude.
To set it up, please follow these pointers.
You have a base, an Hour Ring and a Latitude Ring, which also bears the gnomon.
Remove the nut and bolt from the base, and slot the Latitude Ring into the base. Align the hole for your current latitude and reinsert the nut and bolt. The holes are at 2.5º intervals, so just pick the closest one. There are two holes for the bolt; use whichever one lines up with your chosen latitude hole.
Slot the Hours ring into the Latitude Ring. Looking down from on top, the morning hours should be on the left.
Take the Sundial outside (assuming it is sunny!) and place it where you’d like to have it. There are holes in the base if you want to bolt it down. It should point North. The gnomon (metal rod) should be pointing at the North Star, i.e. the higher side should be north.
To read the sundial, look at where she shadow of the gnomon lies on the white acrylic. This is your Solar Time reading. This will be different to the time on your watch, due to three main factors:
- The Equation of Time. This is where the Sun moves back and forth by +/- 15 minutes during the year. There is a graph on the side of the Latitude ring so that you can determine the correction for this.
- Where you are in your time zone makes a difference; 4 minutes for every degree of longitude.
- Daylight Savings will add an hour if it’s that time of year.
I’m in Central Texas, about halfway across the Central time zone. On June 28th, the Equation of Time was -3 minutes, and my time zone correction was -36 minutes, and we were in Daylight Savings. So when my watch read 12 noon, the Solar Time was only 10:20. When it became Solar Noon, my watch read 13:39. I’ve written more about these corrections here: https://wavytail.com/astrolabe-finding-times/
If you set it up correctly, given the limitations of the latitude adjustment, you should get within +/- 10 minutes of the actual solar time. My own sundial was reading within two minutes – I’m at about 31º latitude.
A useful app to cross check all this is Solar Time: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/solar-time/id1100646247 That’s on iPhone – I’m sure Android must have something similar.
A note about outdoor longevity – I have endeavored to make this as weather proof as possible. The 3D printed parts are made of ASA which is UV-resistant. The rest is made of acrylic and stainless steel.