Dear Roderick, Bill Gottesman notes the Tony Moss method of securing sundials to pedestals.
This certainly works but it doesn't stop anyone with a hammer and a cold chisel doing serious damage in an attempt to steal the sundial. Now take a look at this: http://www.edp24.co.uk/news/keep-your-eyes-peeled-plea-after-antique-sundial-st olen-from-blickling-hall-near-aylsham-1-3319691 You will see two photographs taken in the grounds of Blickling Hall, U.K. The first photograph shows a damaged pedestal but with the dial plate still in position. This dial was secured in a Tony Moss fashion and the thieves damaged the pedestal but failed to take the sundial. The second photograph shows what happened next. The thieves simply walked off with the entire pedestal. The pedestal was 18th century and had a much higher value than the sundial (a modern replacement). It would have been much better to have had a simple lift-off sundial and thereby saved the pedestal. OK, so what do you do? I have come to the view that sundials on pedestals or plinths in public places are simply too vulnerable to countenance. You either settle for an analemmatic sundial on the ground or you have a wall dial sufficiently high up that it is hard to get at. BUT there is a third way... You have a plinth and you want a sundial. I would have a nice design which was printed on vinyl and stuck to a prepared surface on the plinth. The replacement cost is about $5 and the scrap value is zero. What about the gnomon? You design the dial for a rod gnomon but don't actually provide a rod. You drill a hole through the Vinyl and the supporting brickwork and arrange for it to be polar oriented. You insert a simple piece of hollow studding and invite users to put a ball-pint pen in the hole. Vinyl is commonly used for advertisements on buses and seems to tolerate wind, rain, snow, ice and loose stones. The design life is about five years, or longer than the mean time between thefts! Your next challenge will be that someone will steal the plaque but let's deal with one problem at a time. Frank King Cambridge, U.K. --------------------------------------------------- https://lists.uni-koeln.de/mailman/listinfo/sundial
