I had this vice laying about that i have previously used for mcikey mouse jobs. I tried it out of the compund table, but, as expected it was completely useless. I very quickly moved to clamping the stock with the hardened clamp fittings. If you shop around you can get a set of these pretty cheap. I found many places selling them for 50-60-70 pounds and more, but i found a full set in Germany for £42 brand new including delivery to the UK. Bargain. And lets face it, they are all pretty much made in the same place. I didn't have any quality anxiety.

Its always nice to have a dry fit and play once you get all your bits delivered. Its good practice to check the obvious functionality and make sure you haven't overlooked something in plain sight. I don't know about you, but sometimes I get computer screen blindnessand miss obvious things. I can't empathise more though how much i reccomended actually having a design plan and working against it. Your design plan may change and evolve mid stage, but tha tis perfectly normal. This will save so many issues and hurdles later on in your build. You should consider things like maintenance access, cable routing, oil pipe routing, access for grease guns, limit switch locations, homing switch. Natural drainage, coolant protection, earhting, It is much harder to accomodate all these things after the fact, and is often the reason a nice looking build ends up with bent metal brackets hanging of an assembly here there and everywher and cable ties fasten to anything that will listen. A little time in the preparation and design stage makes for a much more professional build. If you are not CAD competent, cut out pieces of paper to scale and play around with the layout and fitment. I regularly do this prior to spending time in CAD..

You can see above how the design was intentionally made to assemble with the use of stephensons blocks to aid the spacing and setup. I work only in metric really when it comes to machine design. These blocks are sometimes referred to as 123 blocks. But you can easily purchase metric versions. I have sets of 102030, 15,30, 60, 2550100 etc.. Using these allows for an assemly that will work almost straight from first assembly. Fine tuning to achieve micron perfection can be done later then.

THe stock material choice was designed to be able to assemble a system whereby the rails could be clamped down witht he standard botls, but also clamped from the sides for extra rigidity.

Its not easy to see here, but underneath there is arround 1mm of movement clearance and i would expect no problems here whatsoever. Don't forget to use the plastic fittings to hold all ball bearings in place when you remove a linear carriage. The bearings can fall out and be lost forever quite easily.

IThe back plate of this assembly is ground tool plate so i new that the tolerance would be very close. As it turned out I could fine tune the flatness of the assembly with planning the torquing of bolts.

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