Of Bolts & Brackets...

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Progress on the router thing today. I received the machine screws I ordered last night, and proceeded to drill and tap the existing holes out for them. It rapidly became obvious that there was nowhere enough meat in the thin casting of the router baseplate to take a decent thread, never mind the fact that I only have twist drills in half-mil increments, and so can't get close enough to the correct size for the tap anyway. [note to self: buy some more drill bits...] However, I decided to drill the holes out to clearance, and use nuts to secure the pins.

Then I hit on the second issue: the baseplate has all manner of excrescences for various historical structural reasons, preventing me from doing so. Three of the securing nuts would have no flat surface to bear onto and would thus be about as useful as [insert proverbial of choice - 'coc oen' will do: look it up]; so I had to make and install a couple of keeper plates to get around it [lower two images]. There's a couple of things I'll do to improve the arrangement, but it's substantially there as it is, so I'm reasonably happy with progress so far.

I've decided to try and motorise the lift, as I've got an old, disassembled cordless drill which has been looking for a project to upcycle itself into for some time. It's a 12v, high torque job and also has a low-speed sun & planet gearbox thrown in; and I just so happen to have a spare PSU from an old photographic enlarger butch enough to supply the current for it, and some nice, old-school ex-aviation micro-switches to act as limiters: so very promising. I've got a ton of of nylon gears and lay shafts in the parts bin, so more jazz engineering is in the offing over the next week or so. Keep you posted...

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