This thing has been rolling around my floor awhile doing important duty like propping doors open or weighing things down while glue dries.
Here's what it looked like last week upon dissasembly. It took a purple power bath and then evaporust.
The back plate came from Shars. It has threads, but they leave the rest of the fitting to you.
Once turned to size I set the chuck on top and used transfer punches to mark where to drill (no pic). I decided to drill a small pilot hole first. The little bit wouldn't hold in the larger drill press, so I plopped mini-me up on the mill table.
Drilling/tapping
I should've taken more time when I marked the holes for drilling because I was off and the run out was huge. Son of a biscuit eater! (That's what we used to say when we weren't allow to cuss.)
Fortunately there was plenty of real estate to drill new holes in the back plate. Once mounted and with some gentle tapping with the screws not quite snugged up I got it dialed in to .001 (measuring on the outside). That makes it sound easy, but what really happened was 12 thou off one way, tap with mallet = 15 off the other way, repeat 17 or 18 times. Eventually my mallet arm became properly calibrated and I got it right.