If you are tired of paying top dollar at machine auctions here's an idea. You simply take a piece of steel, high carbon alloy works best, and with a stick welder, lay several beads of many varying lengths on it. The high carb. will often crack lengthwise down the weld. Then bring the block to a wire edm shop and have them shave the welds off flush with the block. What you now have are ugly cracked welds of differant lengths with perfectly flat backs. Arrive early at the auction and simply wipe off areas on the ways of the machines you want to bid on, and with a drop of super glue stick the welds on. For some reason nobody ever tries to pick the weld off, and its just amazes me how little interest there is in a lathe, mill, cmm, any cnc, with cracked weld all the way across the ways. This is how we buy all our equiptment.
We hope you learned from us; Purchasing Dept. Halliburton
P.S. We have a lot of other ideas we will be sharing with you in the future such as spray-on rust in aerosol cans that wipes of easily with solvents. This seems to work on precision items such as micrometers, gage blocks, pin gages etc.