I am wondering if I could get a little advice here from the community. I am a mechanical engineering student set to graduate in May. I have recently become very interested in machining. I have found every possible excuse to get into the labs to work on the bridgeports. I am very experienced in rapid prototyping; I have built 3 machines, from various reprap repositiories as well as currently pushing my own design out to the opensource community soon. I also built a cnc router ( FLA-100) with a few modifications. While the cnc router is nice for making things out of wood and acrylic it is limited to soft materials. this is my dilemma. I would love to sell my cnc router and replace it with a bench top cnc mill. I have read literally every page on hossmachine. info and also cnccookbook. com. I started with these because I found a zx45 mill on ebay and upon googling zx45 came across both of these sites. I am very interested in the IHturn key system and also the MTW clone, because the size of the bed(39"x8") gives me a lot of room for any project I can throw at it. Because my fiance and I are just getting out of school I dont have a ton of money or a huge garage to put a large mill like a bridgeport in. I have been influenced by reading that IH is a little slow at best for getting equipment and so I am looking more and more at MTW. My question to the community is are there any other machines similar to these that are reasonablly priced? Also is there a print set much like hoss2006's x2freak and g704 that I could buy and make a manual mill from MTW to a cnc? I know that Bob Warfield has documented converting his IH manual to cnc but he has years of experience over me, plus I'm finding that most hobby cnc users have a machine they can fall back on while modding another, but I will not have this option because my buget will only allow for one mill.... for now .
Thank you in advance for reading this, I appreciate any feedback you may have.
-Whizbang