How do you fund your big machinery purchases?

[nobrakes8]

Unfortunately, my answer about money is that you probably need to do it the hard way by finding sponsors and budgeting carefully.

The good news is, if you start with reasonable expectations you can find good used equipment. We bought a belt-driven manual mill that was built in 1981 for like $2500 and I indexed the head in place within +/- .0003 (+/- .0001 if anybody on my team reads this post )

If I were your mentor out in Cali I'd probably tell you to start by contacting this company http://www.permach.com and see what they have for used equipment and some ball park prices so you can set some targets for fundraising. I'd use that information to setup a priority list and you can share that with potential sponsors and see what they can do to help you out. I don't think it's unrealistic to find a few companies that will fork over 3-5k to help buy a machine.

If you want any fundraising advice or anymore detailed advice feel free to DM me --I'm a machine geek.