Damn, but thanks for the update. If you find somebody to engineer a nice one for you, I bet there would be a few of us interested in purchasing these as well (I would probably buy 2, if the price were right). Perhaps knowing there were a few takers on these would help with the cost offset?
Would anybody else be in on this?
Ya know, these guys are local to us in Central CA--they might be hella expensive to hire for this kind of job, but it might be worth contacting them. Looks like from a note on their website that they're moving their shop location pretty soon, so it may not be a good time to drop-in on them, but I'll shoot them an email and see if they do one-off projects or could recommend somebody:
http://www.constructorsrg.com/index.htmlLet us know what you find out on your end.
Cheers-
Flip