Where to start?

Ok, so a quick note on the brief history of our DIY CNC machine (We imaginatively call it "The Machine", or just Version 1).  We decided to make a CNC for a number of reasons and to help us in a number of projects, notably we wanted to manufacture a screen printing press to high tolerances and just couldn't do it by hand, we also hoped the process of making it all would teach us a thing and most importantly of all we did it because its fun to build useful robots!

As a starting point we used the plans from www.buildyourcnc.com and the plan is to re design the whole thing ourselves once we've played and tweaked version 1.  We have already deviated from the plans as they were in nasty stupid imperial measurements so we added some sense and converted all the parts to nice metric measures.  We built the machine out of 18mm MDF and we made the whole thing from a single 8' by 4' board from our local hardware store.

As you can see from the picture its a very basic design but we wanted a simple starting point for our own designs.  As we go along and make improvements we'll try and document them here for our own records and hopefully to help others who fancy having a try and building a CNC machine.