Office of Steam Forum for Model & Toy Steam Gas & Hot Air Engines

Hi Jon,

Nice to see you making some useful bits of kit.

A couple of things that may help: -

1/ When you weld the stiffeners onto the backs place them away from the outer ends by about 1/2" on the small one and about 3/4" on the longer one.
This will allow you to use clamps around the ends without the stiffeners getting in the way.

2/ Make sure you machine the long rounded outer edges square, and parallel, to the two outer flat faces before you try and machine the outer faces... clamp the parts down onto the cross slide top face to do this.
You can then use the newly machined edges as registers against the top of the cross slide when clamping to the 2 posts.

How are you planning on mounting the 2 posts? whilst also making sure they are absolutely vertical relative to the milling spindle?
If this is not perfect then you won't get a perfect 90 deg between the 2 outer faces.

They must also be parallel to the cross slide travel or the ends won't be square to the long faces when you machine them, ideally at the same setting.

Which way round are you planning on machining the longer angle plate?, I am concerned that you don't have 5 1/2" of clear available travel in either X or Y directions under the mill spindle... so you may need to move the part machined work piece and re clamp in order to get the whole length of the surfaces machined.

The engineers clamps will be very useful and it might pay you to make a couple of pairs of different sizes if you have the material to do so.

I look forward to seeing how these 2 projects go.

Best regards to you and the family.

Sandy.