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Originally Posted by Cory
Those plates are going to be hell to manufacture. You're going to need CNC machine tools to do so.
Consider making all rounded/angled surfaces 90* angles and you could do it manually. Also, the right side plate is going to be REAL hard to make, seeing as you're going to have to start out with a solide aluminum block and mill it down so that it's got the angle on the bottom, unless such a material is already sold that I'm not aware of.
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Actually, the side plates would not be that tough to do on a manual mill. It might be a bit easier if everything were squared off, but the layout for this design is not too bad. The right side plate can just be made from a standard size piece of aluminum angle (a guesstimate based on the image is that a 3"x3" angle of 6061-T6 aluminum would do nicely, and they are readily available from
On-Line Metals). Just cut down the flange on one side to make the horizontal mounting base. For the rounded top, align the position of the main axle on the plate with the rotational center of a rotary table mounted on the mill, offset by the radius of the curve, and cut the curve. Probably a maximum of a 45-minute job, including mounting and aligning the rotary table. Everything else is just X-Y coordinates to locate the holes to drill. Very easy if you have a DRO attached to the mill; a little more work but still very straightforward if you don't have a DRO and have to count handle revolutions (i.e. the same technique that has worked just fine for machinists for the last 100 years). The left side plate would be done in a similar fashion, just making 45-degree cuts in two locations instead of the rounding out the top. Making those cuts is just a matter of locating the work properly on the mill table, setting the angle of the workpiece with a tri-square, clamping it in place and cutting the piece.
-dave