[pete from TN]

And to me the best ideas are the simplest solutions to a problem. I would actually be out in the shop right now building one if I had not found today a fellow local to me on craigslist that has a nice granite surface plate 24x18x 4 inches thick for a great price. I am gonna head over there this afternoon to pick up one from him. Apparently he has like four or five of them. I guess I am gonna hafta build a welded steel stand for it and some leveling feet. I am kinda excited as this is my first surface plate and I have always used the mill table or my table saw for that kinda measurements. Now I can really check my parts for square and more accurately and carefully measure my machined parts. I am probably gonna get the tormach system so I will be able to use the plate to set zero on my tooling as well so this should be fun!!

I suppose I would still need a setup like this altho I have an old starret height guage already. With your setup you can make repeatable measurements and zero from one tool to another easily. Nice work and great idea....peace...