I was the lead machinist and I've also been involved with drive train/chassis since the beginning. I'm now in college, and a mentor, but I still take part with machining some of the harder bits, and at the same time teaching the kids how to use such tools. we do just about all of our machining in house, so we use the lathe and mill a lot. We have some old lathes, and one new one that the school bought for its pre--engineering class (project lead the way). Although the lathe wasn't a very expensive one, and so not that great,so you can still find me on the wade 8a toolmakers lathe that did it's duty during ww2 making machine gun barrels. So it's not always a bad idea to pick up the local want ad's and look and see what people are selling. Old used equipment can sometimes be better than cheap brand new. As for the band saw talk. We used to have to deal with a old vertical band saw that would take years to cut anything with no precision. Last year however we acquired a new horizontal band saw that can stand up and be used as a vertical band saw. I think we've used that set up only once or twice. But it makes very clean cuts that are very square, and with the ability to dump cutting fluid onto the part,you can actually handle the part without burning your finger prints off. I must suggest Harbor Freight:
http://www.harborfreight.com/ . Ok, let me second the suggestion as I just read that someone already suggested it) They have pretty good prices. CNC is a nice capability to have but I find that for most of the things, the time it takes to draw it up in cad, put it into master cam, then post it out to the machine, with set up takes longer than just making a part by hand. The only reason we normally use CNC is if either the part is extreamly complex, or if we need a lot of one part, then we got to the cnc lab.