Hi Jay, actually I started the spider yesterday. I had a little trouble finding something with a large enough diameter to start with locally, that was affordable LOL, then I stumbled on to a 4" piece, pretty cheap, (it's $70.00 per foot here regularly).
Now just deciding how much to reduce it to. After I opened up the cover to ~3.6", the diameter of the recess cutout, I turned the OD to 3.4" to see what it looked like and to figure metric bolts for the attachment points and alignment bolts. It's pretty massive. 3" may have been a better choice but I'm not done yet either. So not quite $10K, but a start. I know I didn't need to start out with 4" but I got lots of practice trying out the new carbide inserts I got from Matt, I got his master set with the lathe. They work great. Now I want a threading set in BXA also.
I mounted the sensor and ran the wiring out to the tach location. I need to mill out the AL box that holds the tach soon. I have a 12VDC power supply to power the tach in my electronics stuff. That's all from here for now.
I can't believe how smooth and powerful the PM1440GT is. I easily cut .060" depth, fast. This is my first time with indexable inserts, wow. The 10x30 will probably be for sale soon, unless I decide to keep it for really short work.