Monday, October 12, 2026

What are fiducial marks and does my banker need to know about them?

What's wrong with this picture?

It's subtle; There are two dots, they're supposed to be red.

 When I first took apart the power table feed for my mill, and removed all the guts from the mounting panel, I noticed whoever had made it hadn't cared to make the mounting panel's drilled holes symmetrical and mirror-image.  It went in only one way.

 To save myself time flipping and spinning the panel later to find the right orientation, I put "fiducial marks" on the housing and plate.

 And then one day when I was reassembling everything, and realized it was time for a fit check... oh.

Haha: everything fits!  Provided I spin the plate 180ยบ because I forgot about the problem when I started rebuilding.  Oops.

 Well, the simple solution is to drill out the holes.  This bugs me because inevitably, one of the holes will show some hole under the screw head... where no one will ever see it... but I'm a bit anal-retentive, if you haven't noticed.

 On the very other hand, you can see where I already had to re-drill this plate for the motor drive heat sink.  (JB Weld, The Hole Eraser) Perhaps I oughta make a whole new mounting plate... I probably won't... but you never know...

 And then there's the preventably random engine turning on the plate... the plate no one will ever see again... but it bugs me. I was probably thinking "no one will ever see this again".

 The point is to do a better job of everything than the factory did in the 1970s.  I'm trying.

 All this stuff would go a lot faster if I didn't hurt all the time. And if I could still multi-task.

 ~≈{๐Ÿ‘}≈~

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