Hey guys I know I am a new guy here but I am looking for suggestions in a setup.

This fall I am going to be purchasing a sherline 2000 series mill. The problem is for some projects I have planned in the future I will be needing ~15" of travel in the X axis. I see that Sherline has an 18" bed but when mounted to the Y axis bed the travel is reduced to 13 3/8". So what I was thinking is mounting the mill headstock to an 8" slide and mounting that to the Z axis slide for an extra 4" of travel.

I do plan on putting at least DRO on the machine right away and the extra slide won't be done until probably next summer but I like to have a plan in place. I do understand that moving the extra slide will nullify any zero settings on the DRO, but I just don't want to have to remove the part and have to resetup that.

Thoughts comments and suggestions welcome.