After almost a 2-year hiatus, I was able to restart the Hodgson project. I have a small machine shop in the lab where I work at Harvard so I have a little opportunity to play on nights and weekends.
I used a piece 2″ x 2″ square of 0.125″ of Aluminum 7075-T6 plate to make the front bearing retainer. A 3/8″ hole was drilled in the center of the piece to mount it to a scrap tooling plate in the mill vise, and the center of the part was zeroed.
