Well after an enforced stoppage to works on this project, I'm now back at it. Yeah!!!

Just recap, I'd cast all the parts and machined and assembled most of the machine. All that remained to be done was to mill the table flat and mount the T-slot cover strips. I had initially planned to use a flycutter al-la Gingery's Miller book, but this machine prooved to be too slight to do that kind of work, so after doing some reading I decided to use a 1/4" carbide router bit. It did take some doing but eventually I got the table done.



Part way done, you can see that it all was going to take a lot of passes to do the 248mm X 80mm table.



In this shot you can see, some of the marks left by the flycutter (lower right), and how I layed out the material to be removed so it was in manageable lumps. This was done mainly to I wouldn't go nuts.



Well after doing the top of the table I still had to do the bottoms and sides of the T-slots. This actually prooved to be the fastest and easiest part of the undertaking. Now the question arose, what to use for the actual table top? I looked at getting some cold roled steel, but I could only get 3/4" X1/4" on short notice where I'm located so I decided, that seeing as I needed some cutters for my new Mill I would order some O1 presision ground tool steel as well and make the table from this as I could get the sizes I wanted.



Here you can see the first T-slot, I still need to mill the throat out to size and make the throat run central to the slot, but that is, but one milling opperation away.



Here is what the table looks like with 50% of it's cladding in place.

Well I will post the final installment in this saga soon.

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