My first router i used the carriages from two printers and made a body out of mdf, then used the belt drives and the shafts from the printers to hold everything. it worked okay and i guess i could have continued using it. I got lucky one of the steppers was big enough but the x axis one was not so i found a bigger stepper and fixed that. I should have used the shaft for a spindle rather then mounting the dremel. I think it was too heavy. I was using a ucn5804b board design which has been around for a long time. The chips are obsolete now. And Phil has some excellent designs on his site as well. Most of those chips can be had as samples aswell. I blew one of the chips on my board and started building a new controller board, got carried away with design and have upsized a bit and am still working on another design. I was using drawer slides and the backlash was horible so i went to bearings and rods. I got the bearings from vxd bearing on ebay 100 bearings for 15bucks.
Heres some old pics of the controller board now deceased and my base as i was building the router. JGRO's design in diy wood router section is awesome as well, works well just to have the pdf file and see how things are built in that design.
Phils site a must have.
http://pminmo.com