Quote Originally Posted by d4cnc View Post
How plausible is it to make a machine better than a chinese 6040 for a beginner? At around the same budget. Not including my time..
Yes it's plausible without electrics to build a router style machine but will depend on your skills and how tooled up you are. You'll also need to spend wisely.

Steel is by far the cheapest option but requires more skills,tools and time to get accurecy.

Regards cutting steels then it's mostly down to the spindle speed and strength of machine. Forget router style spindles for steel work they are just too fast. Also Router style moving Gantry is in general without massive over engineering too weak for steels so best going with fixed gantry style machine.
This comes with cost of machine size and in general Fixed gantrys are often used with smaller cutting area.

But in all honesty you should forget cutting steels and woods with same machine has it's much more difficult to cut both correctly and certainly not do-able with £1k.

If you build a Strong router style machine you will however be able to scratch steel away but it won't be cutting really and take much longer and more stressful on machine and tooling than it's often worth.!