Newbie- on the hunt for a small 3 axis home build plan

[RichB77]

As the title states i am a noob at this with what i guess is one of the most common Noob questions going

Some background first.

I am a Mech E/Designer with a good engineering background in everything from Military antenna to consumer electronics. Most of my time is on 3D CAE but i often escape back to the Bridgeport and colchester manual machines.

I am looking to build something for home projects and would like open source plans or similar as i cant afford the huge time resource needed to develop the kit from scratch.

I have the plan set for JoeCNC 2006 found on CNCzone but its a little too grand for what i want.

What i am after is the ability to machine aluminium on a bed no larger than 300 x 300 (12" X 12")

Anyone know of a set of plans that would suit, or a set that would easily scale?

I want to build from scratch as A) buying a CNC mill is more expensive and B) half the fun is in the buildinging!

Budget restrictions at the moment (i say at the moment as i know once i start it will go out of the window) is approx £500 ($800) working, i have a laptop (mobile workstation capable of thrashing Solidworks). I am pretty good at scrounging so i would think the dearest parts will be the controller and motors (maybe servo and not stepper?)

First things first is the chassis/bed/framework.

Any help is grately appreciated

[TOTALLYRC]

If you are going to be using the parallel port, a laptop is going to be problematic at best. Mach3 no longer offers support if you are using the pport and a laptop. Smoothstepper or other motion control card is ok. I am not sure about emc.
Take a look at imserv for these small servo drivers. http://www.cadcamcadcam.com/servo.aspx
And the desk cnc controller and software package. I use them on my router and like it. I had to go to Mach3 for my large mill because of the motion control box I used. I actually use Deskcnc to generate my gcode that I run on my mach3 machine.
Mike