Summary: There's an odd looking part that is described as a turning blank (drill) and has a weird looking recipe.

To make it you'll need the turning table, a means to power the table and the turning tool.

You can "hand crank" the table by making a manual kinetic drive, craft a lever with a IC machine block, and place the resulting machine next to the turning table. Supply power by pointing to it and holding the right mouse button. When you've powered it enough the texture of the top of the table will change to its "active" look.

The turning tool needs one refined iron plate and some regular iron parts. You can make refined iron in a TE induction smelter. Alternatively use Railcraft steel. "Electrical steel" does not work.

The turning "recipe" for the drill part is the list of thicknesses, 5/5, 4/5, 3/5, 2/5, 1/5. 5/5 means leave as it is, 1/5 means turn it down 4 times.
The "handle" is 4,3,2,2,2.
Using manual power you'll have to "crank" the machine once for each operation. If you get it right the name of the turning blank will change to "turning blank (drill)" ... or "turning blank (handle)" if you're making the handle.

i remember looking for this info when i did my IC2 stuff, right before a rollback, didn't think to share it because i felt it was probably the stupidest thing ic2 did... well that and many other things. but anyway, good idea posting this!

Certainly needlessly complicated when it only seems to make two items and currently it confuses NEI. I'm thinking of leaving a working table at spawn so no-one else needs to waste any time making one.

The Steam, heat and kinetic energy features might be neat if they actually were compatible with other mods but apparently IC2 steam is different to other mods' steam, and IC2 water (distilled) is different to regular water. Currently my recommended way to generate EU in large amounts would be railcraft turbines, although an array of geothermal generators is an attractive alternative. I wore out two turbine rotors making a quantum suit, it cost 24 refined iron each to repair them.

On the subject of "they changed it now it sucks" the miner no longer accepts backfill material, so I can no longer auto-place ladders with it. The story seems to be they're thinking of changing it to a complete fill including the side branches but I think it just got forgotten when the GUI changed.

The OD scanner should be renamed the OP scanner as it LISTS THE ORES!!!

FWIW another gem from IC2: how to make coolant cells as the recipe is missing. There are two recipes, depending on if you have distilled water or not.

The basic recipe is to put an empty IC2 cell and 8 lapis dust in a canning machine in fluid enrich mode and supply one bucket of water, it will make one cell of coolant. Since there's a good supply of lapis on this map and you can farm the stuff using "rain plants" you'll probably use this recipe most. BTW I rather suspect that rain plants trigger rain, since slime plants appear to spawn slimes when they mature.

The improved recipe is that if you have distilled water available you only need one lapis dust. As far as I'm aware you can't process a distilled water cell directly into a coolant cell so you'll need to pipe the distilled water into the canning machine, or you can stand in front of it holding a load of universal fluid cells and sneak-right-click the water in. Make sure the empty cells go in first so it fills the cells not the output tank.

Another thing that may be worth dabbling in IC2 for is construction foam. Unfortunately the recipe is awkward, but if you can make the stone powder its still great for blocking up inconvenient holes.

Probably the easiest way to get the stone powder is as a by-product of using an ore-washing machine. The direct way (stone to powder) requires a thermal centrifuge.

Thanks for the reminder about making reinforced stone but even the basic blocks are quite blast resistant and in conjunction with wood scaffolds they can be great for putting up a base in a hurry.

For those who don't know, construction foam is used in the creation of reinforced stone, put a block of construction foam in an iron scaffold and wait for it to harden, if you don't want to wait for the foam to harden use a block of sand on it to make it instantly harden.

Another IC2 quirk: the recipe for the nano-helmet might be a bit glitchy if some parts have been charged before but it did craft eventually, you may have to click on the output slot even though it looks empty. What I think is happening is the client doesn't recognise the recipe but the server does.

The second time with completely uncharged parts and crafting in an AE crafting terminal it worked fine. Just a small follow up: AE gets confused if there are charged energy devices (batteries, crystals) in storage as it will try to use the charged device and this blocks crafting as the resulting item would have a charge state that didn't match the recipe.

Keep any charged advanced batteries, e

Also to do the "Quantum" stuff you'll generally need to make iridium using uu-matter. Unfortunately you still need one piece of iridium to copy. It can be found as "rare" dungeon loot, and it may even be possible to "loot" the 40 iridium needed for a suit without bothering with uu-matter.

Don't bother making the iridium drill, it isn't compatible with the IC2 miner and it isn't all that impressive as a handtool so the only thing it appears to have going for it is a high energy capacity, but it requires a high tier charger.

Oh and the "scanner" destroys the item it scanned. On the other hand you could duplicate the data afterwards.

Scanned:
Iridium
Glowstone block
Ender pearl
Leather
Iron ore
Copper ore
Tin ore
IC2 rubber tree sapling, woah that's one expensive tree!!
Redstone block (ore won't scan)