Jazz some good advice there, something like that as a sticky would probably help a lot of people who are new to all this (would have helped me).
Think you also need to look at what tooling is available to you as well as what skills & ability's you have because this can be a factor as well, I went down the wooden machine road basically because it was cheap & because I had all the tools required to manufacture the machine already, maybe not the right way to approach it but if you are new & don't know any better what can you do.

Sorry blackbirds not trying to hijack your thread but being new to all this as well I am learning all the time to.