i recently inherited a nice Myford ML2. To get it home I stripped of the 'heavy' bits including the headstock. I have been looking at techniques for testing parallelism of cut etc. (Isn't YouTube great) My cunning plan is to fit the headstock and tighten the three fixings, mount a piece of round stock in the three jaw chuck then run a DTI mounted on the cross slide up and down the round stock checking to see how far 'out' things are.

First question is: for a first approximation how long a piece of bar should I have sticking out of the chuck? Then how many thou per inch of bar should I aim for at this stage. I know that at some point down the line I will be doing test cuts so starting figures are what I think I need.

I realise the headstock alignment has to be checked in the vertical and horizontal planes.

Should I get the bed mounted in its final position first? I haven't decided how or on what it will finally be mounted yet. Lots of decisions and I'm not quite sure of the best order to do things. I would appreciate any advice please.