Mini-lathe - angle plate

 Some while back we looked at an arrangement to use the compound slide vertically to cut some slots in some screw heads. At the time I had this angle plate with a shim to put the compound slide exactly perpendicular to the bed. 

Now that I have my MIG welder working again I have overlayed the angle to some extent and I'm using a fly cutter to create the perpendicular surface. It looks horrible at the moment because I did the overlay with the MIG at night, with the inverter protesting at the low voltage.

I've made a couple of passes with the fly cutter and we can see where the welding is low.

We will do some more passes with the fly cutter and then fill in some of the holes.

Meanwhile, we need to make this angle plate as stiff as possible so we will put a brace in each end:

One of the functions of the angle plate is to carry the rotary table. Whilst this has its own 90° mount, it takes up a lot of space and for the purposes of the kickstart shaft we would have to extend the cross slide considerably to get it in the right place. A better alternative is to use the angle plate to mount the important part of the rotary table like this:

We will progress the rotary table mounting a bit further when we have finished making the back of the angle plate flat:

Flat, cleaned up and almost finished. The surface is perpendicular to the cross slide top!

In this next picture there is a quarter inch end mill in the collet chuck and we are using the vertical slide to mill one of the retaining bolt holes into a slot, so that we can perfectly adjust the rotary table to align with the lathe centre.

What you can't see is that I have used a 3/8 inch end mill to clean up the bottom edge of the overlay weld on the other side. This is pretty much finished now, but it may require a couple more holes to bolt down to the cross slide. We will look at that when we set it up to mill the slots in the kickstart shaft.