Lessons learned:
*You can't necessarily get machine cutters in a small town, even a busy seaport town. Apparently those things come from jobbers, not stores.
*When you DO finally find one, twenty miles away, you can't do accurate, nice looking work with machine tools on a cheapo Grizzly drill press. It's just not that steady or accurate: I'm tempted to post a youtube video of the wobble...it would be nice to dance to, but sucks for steel work.
*There's no substitute for real (read, "expensive") metalworking tools.
Options are to spend another day chasing around looking for a drill press to use, hiring a machine shop and waiting....
Considering that consistency can often hide inaccuracy (as long as the inaccuracy is consistent) perhaps I'll change the layout, punching straight through, and using a hand drill and lots of fluid, torque the hole sideways enough for the bar to pass through on the correct angle. Not what I'd wanted, but there's something to getting the job done.
The big question is, how much slop is acceptable?
*sigh*
...decisions like this are what make me, the C.E.O, worth the big bucks. Perhaps I'll vote myself a multimillion dollar bonus at the end of the quarter.