Small update:
Free time has been hard to find lately but I've managed to get a little bit more done.
As mentioned above (post #14) I had attempted to cut the gussets from an 8mm thick length of HRS(hot rolled steel) flat bar with a cut-off wheel in an angle grinder. This turned out to be much more difficult and more time-consuming than I had thought! Also, no matter how hard I tried, the cut was about as straight as a drunk man walks.
I then tried the horizontal band saw in vertical mode, an idea I had originally dismissed as too slow, and as expected it was slow going but quicker than using the cut-off blade. Best of all it was much easier to keep a very straight cut.
The gussets I had cut were the half-cut HRS I had abandoned with the cut-off blade and these were far from perfect.
Last weekend I decided to start over, so I marked up new lengths and started cutting.
Things were going great, slowly, until about half way thru the first cut(~250mm) when BANG!, the bandsaw blade snapped, yay!
I was given a spare blade when I got the bandsaw about 6 years ago, but do you think I could find it? No hope!
Being late Satruday, my local(hardly) Hare&Forbes store was closed and I would have to wait 'till I could get there thru the week during work hours to buy a new blade, so I now turned my attention to the aluminium plate for the EQ6 adaptor also mentioned in post #14.
I dressed the ali in the milling machine to get everything squared, I radiused the corners then drilled and tapped the four bolt holes (to attach to the pier), then I moved to the lathe to turn the recesses to accept the dangly under-bits of the EQ6.
Problem.
Turns out the largest chuck i have for the lathe can't accommodate a 150mm square chunk of ali. Damn.
I looked over at the milling machine and decided my only option was to somehow clamp the adaptor plate to my rotary table to allow me to make round stuff on a square machine. This is not ideal but I had no other option.
The
rotary table only has a 110mm diameter work table so I had to bolt a jig to the table that could hold the work.
The jig was quick and nasty, being a piece of MDF, but solid when bolted to the table with three t-nuts and then the work bolted to it with four M10 cap-head bolts.
After much handwheel turning, the completed adaptor plate was removed and deburred and test fitted to both the EQ6 and the pier(seperately, it was raining, finally) with great success. I'm pretty happy with it.
This weekend I hope to anodise the adaptor.
I can't decide which colour to use(I have many of these colours at hand:
http://www.usspecialty.com/color.php) or whether to keep the machining marks or lose them.
I have to admit I do like the look of the Paramount gear, so maybe I can use Bordeaux Red and keep the machining marks... but then I also like the idea of bead blasting to remove the machining marks and use Black BK....
Anway, I will post a picture of the raw machined adaptor hopefully later today.