Those old photos of your family are great! I love stuff like that. Boy for someone with no patience, you sure have patience when it comes to scraping and sanding😂 The only way I can equate it for my world is preparing fresh herbs when I’m cooking- you def have to commit bc it’s worth it! You’d be good at breaking down a bushel of fresh thyme. 😄

My 2 cents are it would be nice if you added a grinder and old drill press to your inventory to restore . I am a big fan of watching restorations.you make good videos and I enjoy watching.

Hi Kevin. Great story on your ancestry. And your Mom looks great (Happy Mother's day to her!). My Dad just turned 90. The straight edge looks great. I figure you were going to have to do a lot of work on it because of that droop in the table. Your method might be a bit unorthodox, but if it works, it works!

I decided to try out the idea of using a spring-loaded center punch to make divots of similar depths so that one might use them as a guide for heavier metal removal using an angle grinder or belt sander as Kevin showed in his video. Interestingly using the punch with its sharp point not dulled at all produced remarkably uniform divots .016" deep. I wish I could post pics here. But suffice it to say I found a random piece of 1018 steel 3/8" thick and milled off the scale using a sharp 1/2" end mill and fairly slow feed rate to produce a surface that felt smooth. Then I made about 30 divots in that surface using the generic spring punch. Then I returned the piece to the mill and carefully milled off the punched area watching to see how uniformly the divots milled out Amazingly they all seemed to be within .001 of each other. I do think that could be a useful method to guide heavier stock removal. And by dulling the tip, less deep but uniform divots could be made. FWIW Denis

Kevin, you have been amazingly persistent. Good for you! It occurs to me that you might be able to save some time if you had caused your flatness plane to gradually rotate so that the end already in pretty good contact could have been allowed to remain more or less as it was and concentrated on the end in poor contact get the most metal removed there with the middle getting a middling amount of metal removed. As it was, you seemed to have accepted the general flatness plane that first appeared and just slowly raised that plane away from the sole and toward the bow of the SE. I am not sure what I am saying makes sense. But it would be like having the plane of flatness connected by a hinge to the "good" end and then settling and hinging downward with successive passes toward the poor contact end. That might allow about 50% less total volume of metal removal and consequently would have been faster. I know you wanted to use scraper chatter marks as a guide to prevent going too far in any given area. So, I guess you would remove those marks nearly fully on the "bad" end, about half way in the middle and very little if at all on the "good" end. Since early on you were removing 20 thou in some areas I wonder if you could have made divots of uniform depth to guide abrasive removal of metal in quantity. What I am thinking about here would be using one of those spring-loaded center punches to make many divots of more or less uniform depth and then grind down to them. Mind you, I have never done that. By selectively rounding the punch end I think you could likely get it to make a dent pretty predictably to say, .005 or .010 depth. That could allow safe use of your belt sander (with a zirconia belt) to remove more metal in a single pass. It might also make too much local removal more likely. Random thoughts while trying to imagine options. Denis

Shit man... I woulda tried using the Bridgeport to deal with that... A nice large flycutter, slow feed, even if it didn`t do perfectly, it would have to beat the 24thou starting point... Also, consider using narrower carbide for scraping... The narrower the carbide, the deeper it digs in, and the more damage it can do, but it can be used to great extent to cut down on the time spent, then you take a wide carbide and just level out the narrow furrows made by the smaller scraper... speaking of the plate, oh yeah, i see what you meant some time ago... That is quite some pitting, tho, i suppose that it could be taken out with enough effort, or at least reduced and corrected a bit... Tho, that would require some large diamond laps(a good project idea... some old weights, some diamond dust, a chrome roller, you know the drill)... Kind regards and all the best! Steuss

You're not scraping deep enough with your home built power scraper and your carbide should have a much larger radius for this roughing process. In roughing, you should be able to pull up a curl. You are making "chicken scratches", as Richard King would say. Measure the depth of each scrape. Each scrape should be at least 2 thenth's deep. Map out your hollow spots with a sharpie marker, then make enough passes to "scrape down" to that level, then take it over to the surface plate. You are wasting too much time and effort. Denis's castings are pretty nice. I've scraped a few.