I made a little more progress on Sunday; got the base plate for the cylinder anchor cut and the slide plate, spacers and retaining plates for the ram.
Because the beam flange is 3/4" thick, I am using two spacer bars on each side between the base plate and retaining plate; one set of 1/2" and one of 3/8". The whole assembly will be held together with 10 (5 on each side /forums/images/graemlins/wink.gif ) sets of 3/8" hex bolts, lock washers and nuts.
The only challenging part of this assembly is getting the holes lined up on each of the four plates that the bolts go through. The alignment has to be dead on since there is no play between the holes and bolts. /forums/images/graemlins/blush.gif I quickly decided that measuring, no matter how careful, would not be sufficiently precise because even if I could locate the holes in both directions to the required tolerance (which, I would guess, must be less than 1/128" in order to get the bolts through) I couldn't locate the drill press bit that precisely.
What I did, instead, was to lay out the holes as precisely as I could on the slide plate and then drill them. Following that, I lined up and clamped a set of spacer bars on the slide plate and then used it as a template to start each of the holes. I then unclamped and finished drilling the holes and they line up perfectly. Tonight I will repeat the process with the second set of spacer bars and then with the retaining bars that go under the flange.
Once this assembly is complete and checked for free travel on the flange, I will then cut the cylinder and rod anchor blocks and weld them to the base and slide plates. Again, in order to be sure that I get correct allignment, I plan to actually mount the cylinder and rod with their pins on them, tack weld the anchors, then remove the pins and cylinders prior to finish welding.
I'll take a couple of pics when the slide assembly is complete.
