Figured I’d post a few pics of the CNC router I’m currently using. I’ve got a slightly bigger one in the works (1500mm x 800mm). They are not my first, that honor goes to the Shapeoko 2. It wasn’t without its problems but it set the bug in me. If anyone finds a cure, let me know.
A little about the setup. I am lucky enough to live in an area with a good diversity of surplus equipment so when ever I can, I try to make use of that in whatever I build. As it turns out, there is a good source for surplus industrial equipment, which works out well when you want to build CNC-anything 
The enclosure is was picked up surplus here in San Diego for about 1/10th of what it sells for new. I wasn’t looking for it but once I saw it there was no way it wasn’t coming home with me. Getting it home was another story.
The monitor arm is used from eBay and is made by a company called ICW. They sell mostly to medical/dental offices and there are a million different versions. I can tell you that they are heavy as hell and built like a tank. Most are rather expensive, even used, but if you keep your eyes out, you can get them for around $120 + shipping.
The screen on the arm is from the University of San Diego Electronics Recycling Center. Its a Dell E157FPT designed for use in point-of-sale applications, which basically means it comes with a card reader attached, which I removed:
http://www.sandiegoewaste.org/electronics-re-sale-store/
The actual CNC router is mostly the C-Beam Machine mechanical bundle from http://openbuilds.com, and their 345 oz/in stepper motors.
The electronics are also a collection of used goods. The stepper drivers are discontinued from Intelligent Motion Systems, model IM483:
They are fantastic driver and if you keep your eyes out, you can get them for cheep on eBay.
I have 4 or 5 of the very common C10 breakout boards that I use but for this build I have a Mesa 5i25 fpga card and the 7i76 daughter board which breaks out all the signals from the mesa card. The card does all the step/direction PWM generation so the PC doesn’t have to. I have encoders for this system as well that would go on each axis and “close-loop” the system, but that comes later.
The endstops are cheap NPN inductive proximity sensors from amazon:
The router currently on the machine is a small Makita palm router, which works well enough for testing, however I have a Dewalt DW618 router with a SuperPid speed control installed that I will be switching to soon. SuperPid give LinuxCNC full control of the router speed. Check out the SuperPid here:
Thats about it for this machine. If you have questions, let me know.
Its not that hard really. It does need its own computer to run however. Nothing fancy. I run it on a old HP Core-2-Quad computer. I would encourage you to take a look at it.