[QUOTE=motoxy;35987]The guy that did the signage on my van is putting up professional large scale lettering that is ally faced board. Looks brilliant. He has built the mdf book router. He admits its a bit slow but he has time and it makes him money. Interestingly he also gets plaudits from signage forums. Of course metal construction is better but the mdf builds work and some of them work just dandy.[/QUOTE


That will be Phill Fenton from "The Right Signs" then, know Phill well & it was because of Phills build blog on the sign forum that I bought the book & started to build one myself. I've been to see Phill & have a look at his machine & I also know what work he has done with it BUT having read quite a bit on forums about these machines in general I had doubts placed in my mind on a number of issues mainly referring to the maintenance & upkeep of these machines & the fact that it was difficult to leave them running & walk away to do something else while it got on with it's job. Phill has not had his machine for very long & it has not really done that much work but already he has had to replace a threaded bar on the z axis, also I noticed when I visited there was a bit of wear on the ally runners used for the linear rails that I paid little attention to at the time. These are 2 areas that I have read concerns about on the forums so that made me take more notice.

I have already said that I was going to finish the build which I will, as has been pointed out it is still a way to get started & as the machine is just about complete as long as I make sure I buy electronics that I can migrate to a new machine then it won't cost me much extra money to finish. Already spoke to Jazz about it plus some posts on the forum that have been helpful so have a good idea what to look for now.
As with most things new I am sure it will be a steep learning curve, this will at least start me out & get me use to using software like cam & gcode software that I have never used before.

Thanks for the input so far guys, it's been a big help & much appreciated.