Thanks all - Stephen has (yet again) been incredibly generous and shipped me his surplus Lidl unit, so as soon as that arrives I'll be having a play with it. I have a feeling there's a footwell repair on the ambulance in my very near future so that will be a good practical test.
I have harboured vague notions of a CNC plasma being a useful tool but I'm very tight for floor-space already, not to mention time, money, and mental bandwidth !
I'm still getting up to speed with the mill (got a long shopping list for that) as well as having an ever-expanding project list for the 3D printer... these days after staring at a computer screen all day wrangling code I'm finding it hard to muster the motivation to spend all evening doing it too... and with CNC/3D printing if you don't do the computery bit nothing gets made, at least "manual" work you can just go out to the shed and start cutting metal.