I would do my own type of plot item for the ticks. Simply copy the code from QwtPlotGrid and modify the drawLines methods to draw ticks instead of grid lines. Then disable drawing of the ticks for the scales and set the margin between the backbone and the canvas to 0 ( see QwtScaleDraw ).

But before doing it I would explain your boss that this is against the architecture of QwtPlot ( scales and canvas are different widgets ) and ask if he really insists on hacks like this one.

Uwe