@DaveM - Thanks for coming back with some suppliers - I'll check them out. As it happens though, SWMBO just bought me 10cu ft of rough planked seasoned oak - which should keep me going for some time. I've also found a few suppliers of Marine ply on the net - seems quite expensive but could be worth it for clock gears. My current supply is 'laser' ply from murt.co.uk - cheap as chips but not really suitable for anything but prototypes.

I've done quite a bit of work with the machine but all in wood - no metals yet. Did a house sign for a friend which turned out well. I never know what to charge for these things so said he might like to get me a nice bottle of malt, which he did. I put the vinyl cutter on the machine and tried cutting some vinyl signage. That's a bit fiddly to get just the right pressure but once you get the mark, it seems to work well. Mounting them after cutting is the hard part. Other than that, I've mostly been redesigning and cutting bits of SWMBO's anniversary clock - changing the foliet from a suspended magnetic bearing to a ... well, a kind of pin in a cup thingymabob. Definate improvement in reliability but the asthetic needs some improvement.

The machine itself is standing up to my abuse. Doesn't seem to be 100% (more like 98%) running from my Lenovo laptop but it let's me know before cutting (rather than half way through a job) - and a quick reboot and all seems fine. I think that is some kind of USB issue. Every so often it just gets it's knickers in a twist and I get "realtime module blocked". Sometimes that is my fault for starting up with the HW master switch off. Other times ... I don't know - I'll try swapping in 'real' PC at some point and see how that goes. Will do a more in depth followup in a few weeks - hopefully after I get some metal in there.