Made another piece for my machining class! This time it's all within tolerance on the second try ^w^
...except for the hole I didn't drill because I thought I'd be able to do it later, then realized that wasn't the case >.>
Gonna be doing a third attempt, but I should be able to get it this time!
And got it all good this time - every important dimension accurate to 0.005", and a nice sandblasted finish 
@starseeker Accurate to 5 mil? did you do that with a CNC machine, or just very carefully on a lathe or something?
-F
@Felthry carefully on a lathe, yep! It's part of my introductory machining course, which is so far my favorite course I've taken since transferring to this university (and one of my favorite overall)
@starseeker That sounds really hard! We don't know much about machining in general though
-F
@Felthry I mean, this was try #3, so yeah not exactly easy ^^;
Try 1, the digital readout was miscalibrated (kept telling me I'd traveled farther than I actually had) and I also spaced out while autofeed was on & gouged out a big chunk of one of the faces
Try 2, I did pretty much everything right... except I screwed up my order of operations and cut the piece off the stock before drilling a hole in one end (and with these lathes, the part holder that'd be able to hold this in the right position wouldn't be able to re-center it with the needed accuracy)