One thing to remember about tooling, you can spend a fortune, or you can spend very little and get the same results. When I say tooling, I am talking about perishable tooling. End mills. A person can get by with a $3 HSS end mill the same as a $30 HSS end mill. Enco, MSC, Travers, they always run sales on HSS tooling. That is where you have to know your material, your machine, and your tooling.
Every machine is different. Every machine has it's own personality or characteristics. I always told the ones that I trained to run machines that they "Have to become one with the machine". They'd laugh, but they would finally realize what I was saying. A person can tell what a machine is doing more by listening to it than by watching it. Two machines can be built on the same day, using the same exact parts, and built by the same person. But both machines will have slightly different characteristics from one another. One may have .005 more backlash in one axis than the other. And most people think that .005 is nothing. Cellophane from a cigarette pack is .002 thick. A piece of notebook paper is roughly .003 thick, and yes, there is a difference between a red hair and a brown hair, hence the saying...."just move it a red one".
If a person has a fixture to build, the fixture will have dowel pins to properly locate component parts. Take two mills, brand new, built on the same day, by the same person. Drill all of your dowel holes that will receive the dowels in one mill. Next drill all of the mating holes that you are pressing the dowels in with the other mill. 75% of the time, the parts will not slip fit together. So anytime that a person builds a fixture, and are using very close tolerance dimensions, you want to make all of the components off of one machine it possible.
So when a person "becomes one with the machine", you will find out what characteristics that machine has, and it WILL speak to you. You have to listen to what it says. When cutting a piece of material, does the motor change sound when you enter a cut. Does a gear make a little noise. Does the table seem to jump slightly when cutting the material. When you look at the cut you just made, can you read the cut to see why it looks the way it looks. When making cuts, and I mentioned to "become one with the machine", you also need to become "One with the tooling". You need to see in your mind what the endmill is doing when it is cutting material. Any endmill will flex. Even a 1.000 diameter carbide endmill, as rigid as they are, will flex some when in a collet. It may not be a lot of flex, but depending on the depth of the cut, and the type of mill, the direction of the cut, it all has a direct impact on how the part turns out. In using both a "climb cut" and a "conventional cut", one will pull the cutter into the part and the other will push the cutter away from the part.
Depending on how much one will be using a mill, and what sort of materials will most be likely to be ran on the mill, instead of a "Knee Mill" where the bed cranks up and down, one may want to look at a bed mill with boxed ways. The table height is stationary, and only moves in "X" & "Y" direction and not in the "Z" direction. The "Z" direction comes from the head moving up and down. A bed mill is a more rigid mill because of this. A knee mill has locks. Once you have your "Z" height set, you tighten up the locks that will pull the knee back to the dovetails. Depending on how loose the mill table ("Z" axis) was when tramming it in, things could change by quite a few thousandths after tightening the locks up.
Learning to run a mill is not a hard thing to do as long as you "become one" with the mill, the tooling, and learn to listen to what it tells you. For me, I had a couple jobs as a Tool Designer, but I absolutely HATED sitting behind a desk day after day. I love machining and never once got tired of it. Taking a piece of square or round metal, and making something from it is just a great feeling. Our main business was aircraft lighting. The person that started the company was Warren G. Grimes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_G._Grimes
http://nationalaviation.org/grimes-warren/
He was pretty much the main guy that started putting lights on aircraft. I've designed tooling for the manufacturing of the lights, I've built the tooling for the manufacturing of the lights, and I've built prototypes of the lights theirself that have went on the aircraft.
Anyways....I guess I really ventured off track. I love talking about our company and what it has done over the years. And it really makes me proud to see a plane fly overhear at night and knowing that we literally have a few hundred lights on that plane. It's a feeling like no other.
So I want to apologize for rambling on. We were talking about mills, and here I am flying around in the clouds.
On the wells mills. They are nice and USA, I don't know what the going rate today is though. What is the top end of the budget? Are you wanting DRO, power feed, power draw bar and all that jazz? 
