Scraping moves to the saddle

I spent the entire evening scraping. I'm satisfied that the bottom of the cross slide is done. It has a large number of evenly distributed bearing points and looks very nice. So, I spent some time on the top of the cross slide. It was somewhat rough and I figured it should be as flat as possible. I read one person online who had his ground, but several people said that can cause them to warp, ruining my scraping job on the bottom and I didn't really want to have to take it somewhere and pay to get something so small done. So, I figured I might as well scrape it. I started with a file to get the really high spots down, then worked it until I kinda got tired of working on it. It's flat over most of the surface and that entire area measures within 0.0005" relative to the bottom of the slide. I didn't really have to do much to make it level other than scrape down one corner a bit harder. It's not all of the way to the corners, though, so I'll have to spend some more time later. It appears to have bowed up just a little bit with time.

I was ready to try something else, so I launched into the saddle, using the cross slide as a reference. The picture above is after about four passes. The gib side had a ridge on the inside as would be expected and I've about got that down. It's clearly more worn toward the far end than near the apron end, again as would be expected. I really don't think this scraping is going to take too long to get done, given the progress I make already. In general, this machine was not that badly worn when I got it.

I spent quite a bit of time grinding the scraper bit. The large flat surfaces on the bottom and top of the cross slide were easy, but now I'm having to get into dovetails, so I ground the sides and front back so it's more like a chisel. That seems to work pretty well. I don't think I'm scratching the dovetail side very much and I'll be back to scratch it a bunch later on, anyway.

The plan is to get the saddle bottom flat, then use the scraping plate I bought to get the saddle dovetails flat and parallel. Then I'll use that as a template for the cross slide dovetail and the tapered gib.