I think Karl felt a little guilty for taking off on me this past weekend. He needn't have...I managed to get to Mecca for some more work this evening, and hope I didn't over stay my welcome (was there from 5-8pm or so).
Anyhoo, My name is Kevin and I am a gearhead. They say the hardest part is admitting to yourself that you have a problem. For rounding the corners off of the swivel yokes and U-Joint I was thinking that I would just snip off some of the excess using miter cuts in the saw, or with a cut off wheel, and then grind and/or sand smooth.
But nooooooo. I am a gearhead. I had to let Karl, also a self confessed gearhead, and tool junky, talk me into milling them on the rotary indexing table. We're crazy. There's no way that this was a practical use of time. But gearheads and tool junkies are always able to justify using neat tools, just because they are cool, by rationalizing that, "it will come out better this way, this is the RIGHT way to do it, the tool is here so we might as well use it". Doh.
I'm happy for the experience, but I wouldn't bother to do it this way again. Here we go...
First, before removing the Std. vise from the mill ways, I wanted to ream the U-Joint out to the 7/8 bushing size. As you may recall we forgot to do this before losing center. So we just set the jaws of the vice narrow, to prevent the part from spinning, and let the part float a little so that the reamer would find it's own way on center. Just had to be very careful to hold the piece down when extracting the reamer afterward.

Do this times 2.
Removed the Std. vise and hauled the heavy rotary table over to the mill where it took the both of us to lift it onto the ways. The alignment pin I made last night is at the center and the little bits and pieces are the dogging lugs and T-nuts for clamping the work to the table.

Here you can see the clevis over the alignment pin and dogged down.

Using an edge finder to center the middle of the table/hole under the middle of the mill shaft.

After setting zero on the digital readouts, move the table the radius of the cut plus half the diameter of the cutter and this is where our last pass will be. Eyeball everything to make any adjustments for things that aren't perfect (due to welding and hand layout of holes, etc.)

Here's the first sweep just starting with a roughing bit.

And coming around the bend (note the coolant squeeze bottle in the foreground).

Do that a bunch of times flipping the part and cleaning chips as you go and it gets a little tedious trying to crank that little hand wheel at an even rate. Poor mans power feed to the rescue!

Slow speed range, very low variable trigger speed, keep the coolant flowing.
The U-Joint set-up was a little different, needed a longer cutter (which also happened to be a bigger diameter...so a table adjustment was needed), and the work needed to be spaced up off of the table to protect the table from the cutter.



And here's a blurry pick of the parts mocked up after a little hand deburring with a file.

The rough cutter marks will be smoothed over on the Bader next time.
Nutty? Yes, but it's starting to look like the plan, and that's always a pleasure to see.
