Just thought I'd post some pictures of the tooling plate I made today for my BF30 mill.

Its made from a piece of 450mm x 250mm x 25mm tooling plate aluminium sourced locally from Durbin Metals, Bristol - these guys are really friendly and could be a good source of materials (I am not associated with this company).

It has alternate M10 reamed holes and M10 thread holes on an 25mm pitch. The M10 threaded holes are also counter bored to allow them to take threaded tooling pins. I bought some hardened M10 tooling pins on ebay and these are a nice tight push fit in to the reamed holes.

All machining was lubricated using parafin rather than WD40 - cheaper for me.

I cut bolt holes to meet up with the T slots on the mill table, the middle holes at either end are reamed M10 to accept locating stubs that will be machined to be a close sliding it with the M12 mill T slots.

All up, it took around 2.5 hrs to make and should be really useful.

I used the tapping feature on the BF30 mill - once set up this works really well when using a spiral point tap.