Gauge blocks arrived

Actually yesterday afternoon . A really nice wood case , each block is serialized and has the chart of variances . Not that I'll ever need to work to those tolerances .

-- Snag It's great to be straight !

------------------------------------------- Merry Christmas!

I sort of acquired a new toy, in the form of an old one I'd become disgusted with. It's a small rotary table with worm gear backlash that can only be adjusted out at the one tight spot. I wanted to mill a hex recess for a 1/2" Grade 8 nut for the stripped blade tensioner screw on my sawmill and it served perfectly, as long as I remembered to tighten the table clamp.

Reviews suggest other small inexpensive rotary tables are worse than mine.

Having worked with inexpensive (cheap) rotary tables I have found if I put gentle tension on the clamp, and only approach each position from eh same direction of rotation I get pretty good results. That's a little trickier when milling radius parts, but not impossible. You just have to think about it for a minute.

okay. I am impressed. Now I am pretty sure i did not get my set from Shars. Mine must have been an eBay special.

I thought about that job for hours, while trying other ways to clamp and index the nut plate. I have a Sherline 4-jaw on a 5C mount but the collet keyway isn't quite aligned with a jaw, so the plate came up angled in a hex collet fixture. A B&S-0 indexer with chuck is too tall for my mill when upright. The rotary table takes an MT2 collet, which held the shank of a broken endmill as a locating pin for the drilled plate and the mill spindle.

The rotary table was missing its clamp lever, for which I had substituted a

I got these on ebay ... the vendor is discount_machine . I've bought from them before and liked their service .I think it was them I bought the mill from . I've got several Shars tools , they're all quality stuff .

As near as I can tell Discount_Machine is Shars. It always ships from the same address and shipping account as Shars. I try to remember to check their price and shipping on both eBay and their website. Often there is a difference in shipping cost.

I've noticed that with other vendors as well .

Heck, MSC sells on eBay. If I only need one of something its sometimes cheaper net total on eBay even with my account price on their website.