I’d planned to whack the ends off the counterweight gantry I made for Cabin Fever Expo and mount them to a plywood plate, but I hate cutting stuff up. Turns out that the entire beam fit very nicely on the floor joists over the mill and the counterweight even hangs in a reasonable location.
I used a plumb bob to get the pulley pretty close to the right location, then simply moved the beam around until the cable hung down through the middle of the hole. Securing it to two joists means it’s pretty nearly perfectly level along both axes, so the cable’s close enough to being vertical.
Of course, holding it overhead, aligning it, and then drilling the holes in the joists required three or four hands.
The blue doodad on the right end is the laser aligner on its new bracket. The crinkly silver tube is an exhaust duct for the never-sufficiently-to-be-damned radon mitigation air exchanger, a topic I refuse to discuss.
The observant reader will note that I still haven’t made dust shields for those open ball bearings.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 