first ATM project

[barrett@almaden.ibm.com]

I don't know how it happened....

There I was a couple of months ago, admiring Jupiter's moons through my
binoculars and telling a friend about it -- next thing I knew she had
loaned me her wobbly Meade 60mm refractor.  Now able to see two of
Jupiter's cloud bands, I mentioned it to another friend and suddenly I had
a Questar 3.5" for a week.  Then Saturn was so beautiful that I couldn't
get to sleep (but who wanted to anyway with such a fine instrument to play
with?).  The final straw was finding the Lagoon Nebula and a bunch of other
nebulae in my binoculars (why hasn't anyone ever told me that such things
are so easy to see??).  Now I'm hooked....

So I figure building a standard 8" f/6 Dobsonian is the place to start.
I've been pouring over the web, this mailing list and now Texereau.

Hoping not to start a philisophical battle, here's my basic question: Grind
or buy?

My situation these days is that time is sometimes more scarce than a little
extra money, so I'm tempted to buy my first mirror.  But I like building my
own instruments so that I "know" them inside and out and don't need to be
afraid of any part of it.  And I've seen some comments about purchased
mirrors not always being correctly figured.  So I was looking at prices as
a tie-breaker and there seems to be a wide variation in finished mirror
prices:

8" f/6 enhanced aluminum
Orion:   $282
Edmund:  $516

and this is compared with kits (less coating) at:
Newport: $110
CrazyEd: $130

If I believe the Orion price then I lean toward buying the finished mirror.
If I believe the Edmund price I lean toward grinding.

Am I comparing apples and oranges between Orion & Edmund?  Any suggestions
from you old-timers for a green amateur?

thanks for your time!
Rob

p.s.  As a graduate student I designed and built atomic-scale scanned-probe
microsocopes.  Somehow I like the poetry of exploring the full range from
atoms to galaxies.