Manual Mill - Assemblying from leftovers

I was standing in the shop staring at the messy bench thinking if I should start working on the leadscrew upgrade.  Feeling a little lazy after the walk to the polling station, I decided to work on assemblying the manual mill.  Througout the one odd year, I've been upgrading my mill from 5410 to 2010 with longer bed, table, and base.  The exercise left me with almost sufficient parts to build myself a 5410 with Mike helping me with the missing components.  This was an easier job than starting on the leadscrew upgrade as the only machine work required was the drilling and countersinking of a hole for the thrust collar screw on the bed.

The job began with the 11" column bed fastened to the vice after the vice was indicated in.  The Mach Blue micro was used to find the edges and moved the spindle to the correct position, which is 0.5" from the top and at the center of the width of the bed.  I did this thrice to make sure that I don't screw this up to have to buy another bed to replace.  Next came the center drill, a 3mm drill, and finally the 5mm (the screw measured 4.x mm).  The 82-degree countersink drill was next.  This one posed quite a bit of problem given the noise and chatter encountered.  Lots of oil was used and I went in bit by bit, using the Xbox controller at the lowest feedrate.  I tested the screw in the hole till I get sufficient depth with the flat head screw sitting just below surface of the bed.

Starting the hole with a 3mm drill after centre drilling.

followed by the final size drill of 5mm. Very slow feed used.

82-degree countersink bit in use.  Loud noise and some bit of chatter. Hate this...

Test fitting the flat head screw. Nice... head is slightly below the surface of the bed.

Thrush collar installed to see if I've got the hole location right.  Perfect!

Once done, I put on the thrust collar, leadscrew, handwheel etc.  All components fit well.  The only thing that cost me to stop work leaving the job uncompleted was: none of the gibs I have can go through the gap between the dovetails of the saddle and bed.  The best was the brand new A2Z gib (expensive piece of plastic); it only managed to go in half way....  The saddle is brand new.  I'm surprise that it doesn't work out of the box.  I went through Sherline's site looking at all the relevent exploded diagrams for possibly different part numbers for each type of mill - there is only one saddle for the Z axis.  I've to start filing down the gib to make it thinner.  Will leave it to the next session, whenever it is.

This is how the mill look, partially completed.

All 3 axes up. Next is to install gibs and handwheel for X.  Got to order or DIY a handwheel.

I'm feeling so tired today.  Slept rather late watching the result of the election on TV and online into wee hour in the morning.  I encountered some problem fixing up the gib for Z axis.  Even brand new piece from A2Z couldn't squeeze through.  Something is wrong with the new saddle I bought...