Andrew,
Thanks for the reply. Those of us that have been into machining for a long time know all the ways to set up jobs, wiggling, bumping, touching off, indicating and in some cases eyeballing. My question was posed more to see if there was something I was missing. There's always that old timer out there that says "oh you just do it like this." I have several books that I downloaded from the internet, one being the Brown and Sharp book and the other the U.S. Navy Machinists book. They both cover cutting of basically all types of gear forms with the attendant mathematics. The one thing they don't cover is how to pick up the center of a shaft that is at an angle to the axes.
In my years of machining I haven't come across anything that I couldn't solve, one way or the other. It might have ended up as some convoluted setup but it got the job done.
Thanks everyone for your replies.
gbritnell