I suspect you'll find plenty of people around here. I've got a lathe, mill, welder, etc. Actually several of each, but that's another story. I'm quite happy to mix it up with mechanical engineering. How exotic do you want to get? If you go as far as the mechanical properties of porous media I know quite a lot. Less exotic, not so much. Solid grasp of the basics, but slow from lack of education and practice. On the plus side, I have a 5000+ volume technical library.
The older crowd here seems to have done everything one can imagine at some point. Reminds me of Usenet in the late 80's and early 90's and the folks I worked with at oil company R&D labs.
Read the "has anyone built a mass spectrometer" thread.
Have Fun!
Reg