Welcome Husky. I'm not one of the experts either, but if you want to be doing mostly metalwork with your machine you might be best of with a moving table design. If you keep your eyes on ebay or engineering auction sites a cast iron surface plate might make a good solid table and a fixed gantry of thick steel or epoxy granite should let you take decent chunks out of aluminium with ease. If the epoxy route is too expensive, heavily reinforced concrete will do the job but the structure will shrink for 6 months before it becomes stable.

For the matched motors/drivers if you want cheap and don't have any issues with China wantmotor.com have lots of kits, they seem to be the same guys that manufacture most of the motors on ebay. A few people have purchased from them and are perfectly happy but there are also a fair number of negative comments on the web, everybody makes their own judgements about price vs perceived quality.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/German-Ship-...item2a27520b17

Can't argue with the price though. ;)