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This is a 15-minute paper sundial in two senses: it takes 15-minutes to make

and is labeled to the nearest 15-minutes. It is made of paper, but I designed
the gnomon to have a three-dimensional base for greater stability, tapering
to a thin top for better accuracy around noon.

The hard work was my doing the trigonometry for the three-dimensional
paper-craft gnomon and writing a perl script that generates a pdf le for a
particular location. But with the script written, you should be able to print
out a sundial from the generator (http://analemmatic.sourceforge.net/cgi-
bin/papercraft.pl) on my website and construct it in fteen minutes.
Ingredients and tools:
Two sheets of paper, ideally cardstock or some other heavy stock.
Scissors
Paper glue (I use Aleene's)
Printer
Ruler
Something pointy, e.g., a pen with no ink or a small screwdriver
Computer with internet access, PDF viewer
(http://get.adobe.com/reader/), and printer

The script I used was based loosely on the one in my large patio/driveway
analemmatic sundial Instructable (https://www.instructables.com/id/Large-
driveway-sidewalk-or-garden-sundial/). This is a much simpler project. The
last one I assembled took 12 minutes once I had the design printed out and
all the tools in place, and that's counting periodic stops to take photographs.

You can load the PDF le into a vector drawing application like Inkscape and
make it fancier. Just make sure that if you resize the dial, you resize the
gnomon (the pointer) in the same proportions. The script is open source so
you can modify it as you see t.

You can presumably trace the printout on copper sheets to make a fancier
dial and gnomon. I'd love to see it.

This would make a good classroom project at various levels, depending on

how deep you get into explaining how it works.

Note: The script currently works for latitudes between 24 degrees (north or
south) and 65 degrees (north or south). (That covers all of the contiguous 48
states in the U.S., much of the populous parts of Canada and Europe, all of
South Africa, much of India, etc.) The limitations are due to the way the
gnomon is designed to work both when shadows are short and when they
are long, and its having a wider base.
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