What are the chances of getting this setup working?

I am glad.
And i am fully aware of the pain and suffering those types of injuries incur, been over 30 years i messed my spine, still hurts more or less, over 20 years since i messed my knee still hurts daily, elbow, hand, left foot, etc etc.
I learned to live with the pain to the point of not noticing most of the time while working, but any strain reminds me. Luckily, it has not stopped me or even slowed down a bit...well maybe about 10% slow down in general.

I am sure you have also had to deal with the type of people that look at you and go " Oh you look fine,
say can you ( add requested favor here ) for me"? I have had to deal with that a lot. It don't matter how
tired you are, how much you just gut out life's aches and pains. they are utterly convinced you exist
to make other people's whims a reality. 
Sorry went on a bit of a rant there. And no it's no one from  the linuxcnc forum.

my1987toyota wrote:

I am sure you have also had to deal with the type of people that look at you and go " Oh you look fine,
say can you ( add requested favor here ) for me"? I have had to deal with that a lot. It don't matter how
tired you are, how much you just gut out life's aches and pains. they are utterly convinced you exist
to make other people's whims a reality. 

Yeah that never ended good in my case, as i might have mentioned before, until 2008 i was extremely aggressive, not helped by surviving 2 wars, so i made sure i get no such requests ever again.
-
Ending rant here, sorry to all.

No need to apologize, war is hell.

my1987toyota wrote:

Well with my project I got interested in other things and haven't spent much time on it in a while.
Partly the placer head desperately needs updating to modern day equipment. Cable and pulley
for the Z axis is in my opinion a terrible idea but the machine was designed in 1993. We have a few
other PnP machines where I work so this one was more or less an experiment. Plus work just
doesn't seem to ease up.
 

I tend to post and then forget about LinuxCNC for a few weeks lol, forgot to check on this. I just converted the machine I intended to be to a laser cutter.....since I needed one and figured I could actually get that going. I had a belted see-saw Z, which I just stripped to mount the laser to the carriage.  I did redesign it to be a rack and pinion see-saw so that way I could easily swap out the PnP nozzles for and the laser and have a compatible Z. I haven't machined it yet though

It'd be nice if there was a proven simplified PnP setup for LinuxCNC. I'd be alot more inclined to finish the mechanical stuff if I knew software wasn't going to be a long drawn out slug fest. Hopefully somebody beats me to it, if not maybe I'll get there one day lol.

I do find flexGUI to be a pretty easy (ish) way to get a purpose built UI going. I was able to convert the one I was making for my mill into a laser UI fairly simple. I'd definately use that to tackle the PnP thing if I were at it right now.

Where I work right now it's pretty lean ( thanks to the new tariffs ) so I wont be messing with ours unless
we have a really good reason to need it. That said I wish you luck on your project.