OK, so I'm going to hijack this thread now...

So I had been eyeing up the same chinese mill, and not withstanding that "it ain't been seen running" (which I think is a fixable problem), it does seem like a lot of iron for the price. So my question is:
- There are a couple of Hurco VSX24 machines on auction sites at the moment (2001 era machines), for similar money
- I am a complete novice in this area
- What hidden costs/benefits are there from buying classical big name CNC machine?
- When it goes wrong, what kind of costs am I going to have on these old machines (assume I don't have another one to make parts for the first one...)
- Use is hobby/light-production (I can outsource my parts if I needed to, eg it broke, but nice to be able to do them in-house).
- Are these old machines going to be useable from day 1 or will I be hunting down manuals and learning to use the interface (only experience up to now is Mach3)

The main "vs" would be buying one of these nice looking chinese mills with a view to getting them working with LinuxCNC

Thanks for your thoughts/wake-up calls...