Sounds reasonable - both boards are pretty straight forward to build and test. I don't think you really need the +/-18V supply - at least all the boards in this community do not require it. A logic analyzer always help but you can generally get by with out it but the OWLS is very nice and I use it routinely and highly recommend it when things are not working between boards. I think there will be a run of 8 slot motherboards soon so I would get one of those as active termination is a good thing when you want to run greater than 4-6MHz.