Bet it was Important

It’s late and I am not going to sit up blogging, but I thought I should inform the world that I got my rotary table situated today. Try to contain your joy.

Here’s a tip. If you buy a 10″ Phase II rotary table with a matching chuck and backplate, do not expect the T nuts they pack with the chuck to fit the rotary table. All three of mine were almost exactly seven thousandths too wide at the top. And I found this out after removing my carefully aligned vise from the mill and putting the rotary table and chuck on it (total weight roughly 150 pounds).

I had to take that mess off, put the vise back on, align it, and cut the T nuts down with an end mill.

I put the rotary table back on, centered it, saved the zero on the DRO, mounted the chuck, and used a centering indicator on an end mill mounted in the chuck with the shank end up. By beating the chuck with a soft hammer, I was able to get the mill centered so accurately I was not able to detect any error. I can’t figure that out. I wasn’t able to center the rotary table that accurately, and the chuck was on the table, so you would think the error in the table’s placement would make it impossible to have a part rotate perfectly beneath the spindle. Go figure.

So now it looks like I have a 3-jaw chuck on a rotary table, mounted on my milling machine with extreme precision.

The following question occurs to me: now what?