I would like, kindly, to offer a word of advice Brett.
When starting a new project of mine you do need to take time to understand the assembly drawing and how the individual parts go together. To do the later, take adjacent parts and assemble them mentally, gradually building a picture as to how parts go together and function. Basically, this is what Ziggar is advising.
Also, as Russell says, if you make the parts to the drawings then it will gradually become clearer as you start provisionally to put them together.
Unfortunately, I am one of a few who provides fully detailed assembly drawings, many, only partial, or often non at all. In this case I could understand your problem.
As an aside, some may be interested in my method of working.
The first thing I do is to draw a full size, (digitally) assembly drawing. Then, only proceed from that if I am happy with the design and that all things will assembly correctly.
From there, I cut and paste a small section of the assembly drawing often containing just one part. Of course this will include partial details of the surrounding parts which I erase leaving only the part I am about to detail.
Most often, sections of the part will be hidden in the assembly drawing and appear as dotted lines. These are converted to solid lines and where a part passes through another there will be solid/dotted/solid sequence. rather than just changing the dotted to solid resulting in three lines I replace them by a single line from end to end.
The above results in a part which is actual size when the CAD program can then automatically add the dimensions. Because of this dimensional errors on my drawings are very rare. Then of course, I go to the workshop and make the piece of tooling which largely proves the drawings.
I just could not contemplate making something such as the grinding rest without drawings, then producing the drawings later for use in the magazine. I maybe wrong but I personally think that this is where many of the errors stem from.
Back to Brett's Problem. I do accept that due to the size of the Workshop Practice Series books some of the drawings, especially assembly drawings, can be a little difficult to read.
To help therefore in this case, I have added a pdf drawing of the more complex part of the rest that can then be printed out and more easily studied, being much larger than that in the book
It can be found at **LINK** Listed as the “upper portion”. Hope this helps.
Harold