They're welded steel, hand painted, on a cast cement base. They come with a device for anchoring it to the ground, and the sphere can be pivoted and set in place for the right latitude angle. Most Armillary spheres are made up of a number of overlapping hoops joined together. But with this, the rings don't overlap so each intersection is the result of lots of welding and finishing and the result is incredibly.....spherical...
It is a sort of 3D map of earth. One band represents the equator, there are two bands representing the tropics, two representing the arctic circles, one is the North-South meridian and one is .. well.. it's the Polar East-West meridian. The arrow represents the earth's pole. When set up right, it all corresponds to the earth. Your location on this globe would be at the top. The arrow casts a shadow on the sundial band (which lies inside the equatorial ring) and it tells the time. I engaged a blacksmith to do the fancier bits of metal bending and to make the arrowheads and nice hand made nuts (not in photo) which hold the sphere to the frame. When set up, the frame itself serves as a North-South-East-West marker. The plinths are bought ones. They are quite big, they stand about 1.45 metres high (about shoulder height for me), They cost me a lot to make, and take a long time to do... I'm asking $1500 each and if you live within X hundred kilometres of South Gippsland, I'll bring it and set it up and mount it in your garden for $100 more.
Click here for PDF file explaining about the Armillary Sphere and instructions for how to set up and use it
My later model differs a bit from the one in the photo in a few ways:
-there's fancy nuts at sides now
-there's no space between the sphere and its frame anymore
-the Arrow tail is a different shape . ..so I'll update the photos soon