Today I was able to finish up these plate parts by haphazardly drilling the difficult-to-reach holes!
Going into this project, making these threaded holes on the plates' side was going to be a bear to produce. Thankfully setting each of these pieces and getting them running wasn't as difficult as it was time-consuming, and it didn't take me long before I had them all finished!
Visuals are necessary to understand how I was able to drill holes on a 17" tall part with a machine that could only travel 14" in its Z height. I set the vice up against the X-Y axis table's back end so the plate would hang down below the bottom of the top surface. I then put a square in the vice and clamped each plate part onto that square using an indicator and light taps with a hammer to get it centered in place.
From there, it was smooth sailing and only took a couple of minutes to program each part and get them running! I did have to run the speeds and feeds pretty slow for the drilling process to ensure the plate wouldn't get pushed down in the process!