You could probably get a capable machine for $500 on the used market. There are quite a few kicking around. Clearly a fairly simple machine is all that is needed. Not really. Drilling holes in a flat surface is probably the easiest thing you can learn and do. Simple enough you could even do the coding by hand. -- Will

In my experience, you very much 'get what you pay for' with machine tools. Tools that look too cheap to be good generally are. Also watch out for impossible accuracy. I remember seing a hobbyist CNC drill/mill kit that claimed an accuracy of 1/10 thou [1]. Well, the electronics/stepper motors may have been capable of that, but by the time you've aded in the errors due to the unevenness of the leadscews, paly i nthe bearings, flatness of the slides, etc, you are not going to get anything like that accuracy. Note that even solid-looking iron castings (like a lathe bed) may distort by that sort of amount when bolted odwn, hence the require to check and addjust all sorts of things when installing a precieison machine tool. Any machine tool that doesn't require this is most likely not precision :-) [1] To point out the obvious, a 'thou' is a thousandth of an inch. In general, machine tools come as manual and CNC (Computer Numeric Control -- automatic) versions. The difference is that the altter have stepper motors driving the leadscres that psotion the workpiece relatice to the cutter, and thus can be used automatically. Manual machine tools have graduated dials on the controls, you have to do everything by hand. With a CNC tool, you vcan normally move everal things at once (rather like drawing a diagonal line with a pen plotter) and thus may be able ot make shapes you can't easity do on the manual version. That said, I would much rather use a good manual machine tool than a poor CNC one. A mill (or milling machine) is basically a machines that positions a workpiece against a revolving cutter. The workpiece can be moved along 3 aes, it may also be able to be rotated (with most, if not all, machine otols, you start adding accessories, either commercial or home-made and can do jobs the manuifactuerer never imagined :-)). So iot can be used as a drilling machin, or for cutting slots, odd shaped holes, cavities in metal blocks, making strange shapes out of metal blocks, cutting gears, and so on. This is very much true. Home shop machining (I much prefer that American term to the Britsh one of 'Model Engineering') is a hobby in itself. If you want to do it, it's great fun. But that's not saying you hsve to want to do it [2]. Do you know anyone who does this sort of thing and who can talk to you, and /or let you use a machine tool? Buying machine tools (lathe or mill) is a major investment, you don't just need the tool itself, but also all sorts of other bits (you won't do mcuh without a micrometer, for example). You want to be sure you want to get into it. [2] That applies to all sorts of other things, like using PLDs or microcotnrollers :-) I finally got a lathe when I wanted to make a mechanical spare for a device that the manufactuers would not sell me. yes, the lateh cost about 10 times as much as the device was worth, but I'd been looking at them for some time, and I knew I wanted one. I have several interests where the ability to make metal parts is very useful. When I was making PCbs, I found the UV method to be more reliable (even though the pre-coated boards were more expensive). The UV exposure unit is easy to build (the UV tubes are avaialbe as spares for commercial PCB exposeure untis, they are notm of course, the same as the ones used to erase EPROMS), the starters and balasts are the same as for normal fluorescent lamps, and the timer is pretty easy to design. What are you planning to plate? AFAIK gold plating (which is the one you ar most likely to wnat to do) involves some _very_ toxic substances. It';s very much up to you. I enjoy metal machining, and it's useful in many of my hobbies (classic computing, horology, even photography). But I certainly wouldn't suggest you should go out and buy a machine tool without carefully considering what you want to do. Basically, yes. An old trick, which I've used many times with a Dremel-type drill is to clamp a bit of perboard over the IC pads on the PCB and drill through the holes on thbe perfboard. Sure they weare out fast, and the accuracy is not perfect, but it's a lot better than doing it totally by hand. I don't see the point of this if you're making one-offs.I would only really be interested in making one-off prototpyes at home. FOr those it's handy to be able ot chage the desing and get a quick turn-round, and/or not have to meet some minium order size. Buit if I ahve a design that I want, say, 50 or 100 boards of, I'd got to a PCB company. -tony