Welcome to the forum Tony, like you I am new to the forum & the world of building your own machine but have already had some great advice & learnt a lot, you will need to totally rethink things if you originally wanted to machine just wood but now looking at machining ally.
If you have any designs already the guys on this site will be happy to pull them apart for you lol
Seriously, if you look at some of the build threads you will see that people have had lots of help in getting designs right so the machine will be able to do the jobs they want it to.
Good luck with your build.