Welcome aboard Adam.
You've found the right place to learn about shaping metal, you'll find answers to just about any question you can come up with around here.
You've also got lots of company close by in the metalshaping community, as there's lots of members here from the Southern Ontario area. If you would like to do some hands-on reasearch before building your english wheel, you might want to join us down in Whitby in less than two weeks. We're getting together for a metalshaping weekend, and there will be a few different english wheels around if you want to try them out.
Here's the link to our thread in the events forum:
http://www.allmetalshaping.com/showthread.php?t=2597
Ken