Curved Cam Expansion Plate Prototype

This is a prototype mechanism for a project I am working on. It was constructed on a small lathe and a manual milling machine.

Machining is a new skill set for me, I think I've got the lathe pretty figured out but the mill is an interesting beast. I find it takes about 10 times as much work to mount and align everything than it takes to actually do the cutting. The slots are fun to mill, the plate gets mounted on a rotary table, aligned carefully then spun under the cutting head for the right number of degrees, creating a nice precision curved slot. For these the whole thing is offset as the centre of the slot is not in the centre of the plate. End result looks like CNC but its done by hand.