As an aside to his experiences with SketchUp, Roger Ackerman mentioned an acquaintance who had made his own CNC router machine. Roger took the bandsaw box that was made at our October 2008 meeting and carved in a picture of a house in the lid using the CNC router. The photo doesn’t really do justice to the detail that could be achieved with the CNC router. The CNC router did take quite a bit of time to finish this carving, however, and probably was quite a bit noisier than using carving tools to do the same.
If you are interested in building a CNC router, you can start with this article from IEEE Spectrum magazine that will give you a good start.