[hoopladler]

Wow - that is beautiful.

You're almost certainly right about good metal-milling CNC machines never being cheap. I think the only possibility to make such a thing economical would be by re-purposing car parts (I think if you could work out a way to use common car parts and clever software, you could step around the fact that things manufactured to high tolerances out of steel are expensive - since car parts are both cheap, and well-made).

That said, the thing that really excites me about CNC is just how much it opens up a whole load of projects that I haven't had the tooling or the mechanical skill to take on. I'm a bad carpenter, so when I make things out of wood, I tend to have to allow massive tolerances in everything I do. Even a CNC that could only cut softwood would be really useful for me.

I've actually been ummming and ahhing about buying one of ali-express - where did you get your engraver from?