tesseract

drush - your best option here might be to replace wood, rather than strip it. A drum sander will do a decent job of removing the paint from the decking - use a sanding belt cleaner often on it! - but removing paint from railings, balusters and anywhere two pieces of wood meet is truly labor intensive. If there are several different kinds of paint involved here (ie - polyurethane AND latex floor paints) then keep in mind that no one chemical stripper is truly effective at them all. An infrared stripper and lots of scrapers has proven to be much more effective in such cases for me. Whether you decide to strip paint, replace wood or do both, you will be spending a good chunk of that $2600 on materials and/or equipment!

Hitting your price point doesn't seem to be a problem, but have you considered how you are going to get a machine that will weigh somewhere around 1,000lbs from the dealer to your door (or truck/trailer bed)??? Going to an out-of-state vendor to save on sales tax is a powerful incentive, I admit, but the shipping is going to kill you (maybe not just figuratively, either!). Keep in mind that when "free shipping" is offered for items like this there is always a requirement that the delivery be made to a commercial address. The gist of this is that you must have either a forklift or "dock high" loading pedestal (something few houses seem to have, I've noticed ;) ) to unload the item from the semi trailer - the driver is only responsible for getting your item to the back door of the trailer, and is often prohibited from doing anything else out of liability concerns. So you may want to buy from dealers more local to you; two are Spray Mall (Boca Raton) and Water Cannon (Orlando).