Anyone ever though 'bout using/building a pantograph to manually engrave panels ?Saves lots of trouble of building your own CNC and should give similar results.

Actually, I have given substantial thought to using a manual pantograph engraver. A big issue is the pattern you follow. To keep the engraver from wandering the pattern has to have a groove that the tracing nib rests in. The old pantagraph machines came with a set of machined templates for the letters and numbers. (This is actually where the Gorton font came from. Gorton was one of the companies that made engravers. Gorton font was called for in aerospace contracts years ago. Maybe still is.)Without a proper template the engraved results look pretty shakey.So how do you make the template? Well, you could build a CNC machine....Mikewww.mikesflightdeck.com

Since the pantograph can reduce size of the eventual engravement, one could manualy engrave bigger letters in plexy ?

There are a variety of pantograph mechanisms that allow changing the size of the engraving relative to the pattern guide, some bigger, some smaller.Mikewww.mikesflightdeck.com