I ordered an AA plate today. 6 week lead time but it will be here around about the time I get back from visiting my family in Australia (way more expensive than a surface plate lol)
I'm working out of a 20x60ft commercial bay. I keep it around 10*c. The floor doesn't seem too bad, I have jack bolts under the stand legs too. My monarch lathe hasn't moved noticeably in a month since getting it leveled.
Id like to get some more machining work now I have a bit more capacity in my shop, but the other part of me doesn't want to. Currently I run a service truck, doing heavy equipment and industrial mechanic type work, along with the odd line-boring job. It's a lot less bullshit business wise than what I remember from working in general machine shops. None of my work is quoted, just charged by the hour. The trade off having to lay in the mud/snow/side of the highway!
Machine rebuilding would be a great trade, and something I always wanted to do once I read Connelly's book. When I was an apprentice in Australia I looked pretty hard for places to work to learn handscraping etc, but for memory there was only a couple of machine tool rebuilders in the country and none in Melbourne where I was living, plus none hired me obviously (smart move on there part; I was an 18 year-old shit head).
It only took 11 years but hey better late than never.
I got the flat side to where I'm going to call finished. I'm going to get some castings from Denis, so I will save the time and energy to use on them.
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Started on finishing the bevel side to find out it still had a big bow in the front face (thanks previous me)
. The excess weight on one side made it pretty hard to spot this accurately and I regret not taking some weight out of it.
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I circled the section where I have scratches in the middle of roughing strokes running with the stroke. This only happens in durabar. What is the likely cause? I sorted out most of the blade magnetism by rapping it on the bench
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Still got a little bit left to finish bevel side but I think I'm going to take a break for a day or 2 as I might have little bit of scrape-brain. I don't need this edge to spot with for the cross slide ways but I'm sort of committed to it now.
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Also Richard I am using Norton fine India knife stones for deburring, a little smaller physical size than the part number you recommend. Is it an acceptable method to stone excessively/use a burr file in initial scraping passes or a bad idea?
Stay safe!
. You seem to be on the right trajectory. Once you have done roughing, start spacing out your strokes and lines. About one scrape mark distance from one and other. As you get to denser spotting, change to a finishing blade (60 or 80mm) and shorten your strokes, I would say in finishing, your stroke length should be 2-3 times the width of the scrape mark. Once you are at an even coverage above 20 to 30 PPI, start pecking at the highs. Learn to read the blues. There are a lot of nuances there, both in individual spots and patterns of spots. You know, the usual stuff, shiny spots, dark outlines, light spots, sparse and dense areas, you get it sooner or later. Hinge often. Things get more interesting when you start scraping for geometry 
