Well I'll be damned. Success at last.
I met a friend at the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum this morning for a session of picture taking and when I got home I was kind of dreading having to make yet another shim for the nut. Realizing it won't fix itself, I decided to have at it. I pulled out the next size up of my stash of brass shim stock, .015", and was about ready to cut a piece off to make the shim when I decided to try the .031", .008" and the .012" shims together and see what would happen. To my utter amazement, it worked like a dream. No binding or scraping the full travel length. Nice and smooth all of the way. At this point, I hadn't installed the gib yet. I was just pushing against the side to keep it against the dovetail while I cranked the hand wheel. So I put the gib in expecting the worst and low and behold it works like a charm. I measured the backlash and it's about .0015". I walked over to my work bench to get some allen wrenches and spotted a shim sitting there. I
and wondered where the hell it came from and suddenly realized it was the .031" shim. In reality I had only installed the ,008" and the .012" shims, not all three of them.
All I can say is it's a damned good thing I don't do this for a living.
I just need to reinstall the DRO scale and this project will finally be done.
I have to thank Ken again for being so generous with his time and materials. I would have never gotten this problem fixed without his help.
Time to celebrate.
Ed