That's very cool, and a beautiful piece in the end. Good choice to do it in 303. 316 really is a pain. The ingenuity required to get things like this one on ma

That's very cool, and a beautiful piece in the end. Good choice to do it in 303. 316 really is a pain. The ingenuity required to get things like this one on manual tools (especially pre-DRO, but even now) is amazing. Starting out machining, I expected the machining to be the hard part, but often a lot more time is spent on planning, fixturing, set-up, and so on. For example, the idea of making custom vise jaws to hold odd-shaped parts seemed crazy to me the first time I heard it, and now its just a completely normal way to behave. CNC makes things a whole lot easier, from being able to do complex shapes with CAD/CAM, to simple things like interpolated circles (when the mill cuts a circular shape by moving X and Y simultaneously, a seemingly trivial thing that's nearly impossible on a manual*). Having a 4th or 5th axis makes complex stuff even easier, and often completely avoids the need for wacky fixturing. The lathe fixturing here is especially fun. A lot of old hobby books are written assuming you have only a lathe and no mill. Fun, often scary, fixturing was the order of the day. * Ok, you can do crazy things with boring heads, but getting it right is really hard.