Game on!

[Voicecoil]

I've got most of the pieces machined up now and waiting for the dozy anodisers to do their stuff on some of the beams - whilst it's obviously a home built machine I wanted it too look vaguely OK and I don't really have the space for some 3ft long anodising batths at the mo. Today I finished off making the spindle clamp, I'd cut the outside profile and done the holes a few weeks back, but I've been waiting for a friend to have some free time so I could use his mighty steam-powered lathe to bore the hole. Here it is after putting a 30mm drill through to start things off: And yes, that's a 300mm chuck and it's a heavy lump!

Then it was something like 3 hours gentle boring out, with a few minor hiccups and several Km of swarf - here's the end result:

The internal finish wasn't quite as good as I'd hoped as he had a rather limited range of boring bars and with 80mm of tool sticking out from the toolpost there was a certain amount of resonance going on; never mind, no-one will ever see it, and as long as it grips the spindle I'll be happy.
The reason for making the spindle clamp was initially because I couldn't easily source an 85mm part OTS, then it kind of led to some lateral thinking about how to implement the Z axis with good strength and minimum width - all will be revealed soon when I start putting it together