Desktop CNC mill for narrow boat home office!

Hi,

I'm hoping to buy my first CNC mill in the next few months. I work in a product development company as a design engineer and frequently have parts for prototype mechanisms made by external subcontractors (usually fairly delicate 5-axis stuff in engineering polymers, chunks of ally for test rigs, or SLA or SLS rapid prototyped parts). We run a few seats of Solidworks and Pro/Engineer. It usually takes at least 3 or 4 days to get parts back so I'd like to be able to do some of the simpler work in-house to speed up the design process.

Additionally, I do a lot of fairly heavy DIY on my liveaboard narrow boat (like hybrid propulsion and solar tracking for our panels) and really miss having access to the manual Bridgeports and Colchesters at the company I used to work for.

We have an office/lab in Cambridge (which I reckon also needs a CNC mill to complement the growing range of facilities) but I work from the boat as we like to move around the country. There's not a lot of space on a narrow boat, so I started looking at the Sherline and Roland machines but I think I'd like something a bit more sturdy and capable.

The TAIG mills look ideal, particularly the DSLS 3000 with closed loop control. I'd really like to see a mill in the TAIG family in the flesh and I'm hoping this forum can connect me to an owner nearby - watch out for an imminent post on the "Mills, Routers, Lathes, etc" forum. We're currently just south of Birmingham.

Cheers!

Robin