Hi John,

Thanks for the reply; Re. the gantry I'm only thinking to have this on the timber orientated machine. Thanks for the suggestion of buying a mill and converting - I have seen this thread on here: http://www.mycncuk.com/threads/7662-...-Scratch/page9
which looks to be a pretty solid mill built from scratch, though i've no idea what the price works out as vs buying & converting. On the whole though the construction of it seems pretty simple? Re tools I've got a good quality pillar drill, access to a tig welder, metal lathe and most other basic equipment.

Re. the 5 axis I need to be able to process sheets as a large proportion of the material being used comes in this form, so a basic xyz router would do fine for this. Beyond cutting out shapes though most of what i'm planning to make involves alot of angled edge cutting and egde boring. In the first manufacturers i worked at they had a 5-axis gantry style cnc with a pod rail set up which could do all sorts of angled cuts and edge drilling, and then when they needed to process sheet they would stick a vacuum board onto the boards and do standard nested cutting. I definitely won't be getting pods and rails but the principle is similar - I want to be able to do nested sheet cutting and also have the ability to do more advanced processing on the individual components afterwards. I've been to a few other workshops which used a gantry cnc router (3 axis) with an aggregate head on to provide 4th & 5th and it seemed to work pretty well..

Thanks,

Alex