OK, so been a bit of a disaster today!
The table looks great, pics to come tomorrow I promise.
Now, I asked for the slots to be 3/8" deep which they are, but because of the lack of material and flex under pressure of the mill head it does tend to vary a bit along the length. It is 3/8" at the deepest point and up to 20 thou' less at one of the ends. I'm just hoping the thickness of the mitre bar is thin enough to compensate for this or i'm back to square one.
I didn't have the heart to ask if they could take a bit more out of the depth for me considering the trouble they had gone to and also the lack of a fee.
The set up sounded a nightmare.
1. Clock up the two slots and find the high and low spots to see how much needed to be removed.
2. Check the thickness of the casting along each of the slots to ensure there was enough meat.
3. Mill the underside of the table to give it a flat base as there is was slight twist across the opposite corners.
4. Find the best datum to work from to ensure both slots would be parallel.
Cost.....
Working on £30 per hour, if the table was flat/square/true ect.. and all they needed to do was put it on the machine and clock up/mill out, it would have been done within an hour.
As it was nowhere near and took between 2-3 hours this could have cost me up to £90.
Fergus is right, there will be a variance between tables and it is a risk, personally one I would not be willing to take.
Wizer, not got the incra yet, need to get hold of an old 3/4" mitre gauge first to see if it fits in the slot.
Anyway the disaster I mentioned at the beginning, made two dummy runs at cutting out a pocket to fit my router plate today, both turned out perfect.
Set up everything on my newly made worktop consisting of:
3mm melamine
18mm MDF
12mm MDF
18mm MDF
3mm melamine
Cut the pocket out, removed the guides (big mistake) which were carpet taped to the surface and tried the plate in the hole...Too small :shock: :shock: punched everthing that was close to me and screamed into my fishing unhooking mat ( which stank due to a sucessfull afternoon yesterday) :x
I've now got to come up with a way of re-jigging to removing about 1.5mm all the way round the perimeter