Attaching the bed

The bed and the pedestals are now attached! I figure the bed and risers is just over 200 pounds. I made a simple cantilever lift from 2x6's so I could easily set the bed down on the pedestals with little effort. That hydraulic table is one of the handiest things I've ever purchased. Anyway, it's at home now. I attached the foot bracket on the other end, but I need to get a couple bolts to put on the other two feet. Then I can look at leveling in place.

I cut two pieces of wood that go between the bed and the chip tray. With them in place I can slide the lift table under the whole thing and lift it right up to move around. Works just fine.

I intentionally filed the scraping experiment so I could do it again, getting more practice. I'm getting better, I think. You can't really mess things up very quickly, since the process removes so little material at a time. I picked up an ink roller and that made all of the difference in the world on getting good transfers to the high spots. I may be confident enough pretty soon to look at that cross slide. I found a set of scraping plates including one flat and one 60 degree on eBay and got the set on a Make Offer. I had been concerned about how to make the 60 degree reference I would need and this solved that problem quite handily. These were supposed to have been made in 1954, which makes them five years older than I am. But, good tools should last longer than we do.