Registered with the site about a month ago & just realised I hadn't introduced myself.
I'm Martin & I work part time as a signmaker, I have an engineering background having spent nearly 20 years in the Royal Navy which does come in handy on occasions still. As in any sort of business you are always looking at ways to produce as much as you can in house & one thing I had always fancied was either a cnc router or laser engraver. The high cost of these machines meant that it was not a realistic option for me at my stage of life until I read a series of posts on a signmaking forum I use by one of the regular contributors who had built himself a cnc router for under £600. Phill had bought a book & following the instructions in the book had made an MDF based machine with a table size of 4 foot by 2 foot.

That was all the encouragement I needed so having now purchased the book myself I will hopefully be building my own machine over the coming months. From the research I have done so far it is pretty clear that although you can build a machine that is very usable for the sort of thing I would like to do on a low budget as soon as you look at possible ways to improve things then it can suddenly become very expensive lol