This is part 2 of an 18 part thread on prototyping by Dan Gelbart. Anyone who has a bit of time will probably find the whole series to be of use as he has ideas for clever, relatively inexpensive shop made tools for both a drill/mill and a lathe. He is very fond of water jets as a prototyping tools, but I suspect those are way of of budget for most DIY shops. I'm a relative "noob", so find videos like these, the tubal cain and MIT videos great learning tools