Defy - an attempt was made! lol... it was my first time trying to make one so learned a bit. Cheers though!
@Zeeflyboy You say you did that on a hobby machine, well that's even more impressive then. Do you mind me asking how much the machine cost and do you have a link to somewhere that sells it please?
If I remember correctly it came to around £2.5k delivered with some optional extras like the 4th axis and a vice or two... but I've had it around maybe 4 years or so now, and as I'm designing my own machine I haven't kept up with whether there are better options around these days, you may well be able to find better for the money now... or hang around somewhere like mycncuk.com and keep an eye on the classifieds to pick up a probably significantly better used machine. With those caveats mentioned I got it from omioCNC in china.
I have done a few upgrades such as re-wiring the box in a less lethal manner and with shielded cables (machine didn't come grounded as they are worried about noise on the usb line, but I'm pretty keen on not killing myself), adding a high pressure air and misting coolant setup (a must have if you plan on doing much work in aluminium) switching to a different control board that uses ethernet instead of USB which is more sensible, and also changed out the steppers to closed loop ones although there's nothing really wrong with the stock ones. I added a closed loop water cooling system for the spindle (something guys here should be good at lol) and made some improvements to the bed.
Ultimately it's fairly cheap and cheerful and has some glaring design flaws but what was certainly a rarity back then at least was that it comes with proper linear rails which is vital for getting good results in anything harder than cheese. It's a light duty slightly honky wonky chinesium machine still but if you learn to work around it, which can take some time, you can get it to churn out some nice stuff. The advanced machining strategies available in fusion really really work well for it with a bit of tweaking, and I've had some stellar results in aluminium - here's the Z-axis I made for the new machine for example, all made on my current CNC (cutting the aluminium plates), lathe (shafts and pulleys), 3D printer (seals and plugs) and the anodising rig in the garage (oh and etched with the wife's laser!).
An example of a raw part still on the machine:
