I am a retired electrical engineer living in Colorado who learned machining on the job. I have a Bridgeport mill that I converted to four axis CNC. Most of my work so far has been three axis, working in aluminum, steel, and occasionally titanium.
This is a hobby for me, but I occasionally take a job for pay. For example one friend is a mechanical engineering professor at the local university, and is designing a folding bike. I have machined a lot of prototype parts for that project.
My mill uses Mach 3 with the Galil plugin, and a Galil 1850 controller. I built my own power supply from an old microwave oven transformer. The Z-axis moves the quill up and down using hardware I machined from a design found on the internet. The X and Y axis hardware is my own design, and servo motors drive the three axes. The fourth axis is a work in progress, using a stepper motor at this time.
I am using BobCadCAM V26.
Good luck with your projects.
I started with BobCadCAM V28, it was similar to V26 I think.