Hi my name is Dan, I am new to this forum and very impressed with what a lot of guys and gals have done,
on an alternative to mill and lathe setups I thought a Roland Modela MDX-15/20 desktop subtractive rapid prototyping machine(small cnc mill) would be an interesting choice, you have to give it 3D data to work so you will need a solid modeling program but you can do some pretty neat stuff with it, there are limitations as with other machining setups but getting around them is part of the ingenuity, hopefully in the future I will get a small lathe to compliment this machine or a fourth axis
here are a couple of pictures of the machine and things I have made with it
Machinable blue wax
Polyurathane resin
Start of my jetpack model
silocone RTV mold
MDX-20 in its box
Managed to get the pictures back, suppose I must read up on how to post pics properly