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Originally Posted by BeardyMentor
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3) Remember you need tooling. budget 20-50% of the purchase price of a machine tool for work holding and tooling. In similar vein; Make sure you have the software you need. For example; a CNC mill is not a whole lot of use without CAD *And* CAM software. It can be a killer if your school gives you a grant for that $50,000 vertical machining center but not for the CAM software to drive it.
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If you go down this route and end up with the machine without the software, the student licenses of SolidWorks work just fine with HSMWorks Lite.
Some of the features are disabled in the Lite version but you can do a lot of the basic stuff with it.
Another CNC issue is make sure you understand all the parts of your CNC system before you buy it. A CNC plasma table without the plasma cutter is not very useful. A manual mill with retrofit and no control is equally an issue.