Firstly, I marked out the location of the hole centres using a Vernier height gauge.
Then I clamped the plate to a faceplate ready to drill the two main holes that house the bearings, (needed to make sure that these holes were perpendicular to the 2 forward bridge holes that I drilled after);
Then it's back to the bench to drill and tap the bridge post holes;
I also opened out the mount hole locations, this was just a simple task of letting the drill find the centre of the countersink in the casting and drilling through using a pillar drill.
We decided to go with the polished look and although I didnt have a great deal of time to spend on this, it came out pretty good. I firstly smoothed off the entire surface then gradually stepped down grades of sandpaper before I went to a coarse polishing paste down to fine to finish. After the polishing, I masked the area to be sprayed and painted with a base primer then a matt black to achieve this finish;
Then, finally, went over the tops of the letterings to get the final result:
I did go over the countersinks after this shot so that they were simular in size as the casting was pretty rough! I think once assembled this would have looked pretty sweet, though I would have liked to have spent more time polishing out some scratches, it's a long arduous process if you havent got the right tools though!!!
