Hi Doddy,
Thanks for sharing your experience - yes I take on board everything you have mentioned. I have yet to venture into installing the endstops on my cheap little hobbycraft :) machine..

Retrofitting endstops on these cnc3018 machines requires the fabrication of yet more cheap plastic parts to hold the micro-switches in place. This requires even more complexity in the form of getting hold of a 3DP and my thinking was to avoid it all together for my machine.

I moved into computers as all the manufacturing moved to the East, so never really got the opportunity of applying may of the principals I learnt. Back in those days, I was using a CNC machine to run batch drilling of printed circuit boards and now that I gotten out of borring computers and software systems. I thought why not get myself a small hobby cnc and keep my brain ticking.. I am actually a Brit who mirated to Western Canada a few years ago.