Rusty is going a bit far for describing the rails. There wasn't any red-brown rust, just the spider-web black lines showing where corrosion had started.

I have got the machine for another two weeks at least, so will see what I can coax from it but I am coming around to your way of thinking, that it could be more trouble than its worth, or that it will still be worth more to its current owner than it will be to me.

There are a limited number of things that I have wanted to do on a CNC for a long time, but they are still a limited number, and I am not sure that I would ever manage to do enough to make it pay any significant contribution to its own cost. Simply working on it and the CAD/CAM is somewhat addictive, and I have a long list of other build projects that I should be working on....like turning the stack of 3m joists that have decorated one side of my dining room for nearly three years into a carpenters work bench! When Lucan07 suggested building a better machine, I thought about that pile of timber and the relative complexity of bolting a bench together vs construction of a precision power tool + wiring a computer interface. LOL!

I am still enthusiastic about CNC and its hard to keep reining that in to think about such a tool purchase in a rational manner. Thanks for helping!!!!!