Hi boxhowto,
first of all thank you for the kind words, we all feel the same: serious and passionate people is what we all are in this forum, so welcome and enjoy!
I have had the "pleasure" to work on an Aysis not long ago and for the life of me I could not get past the boot up sequence, I have had to call an expert to go into the DOS configuration to even get the computer to start properly.
once the beast was up and running I could really appreciate all the features and the versatility of it, a brilliant brilliant piece of kit.
the Axiom is nothing but the music version of this desk, they share same control surface,same architecture and same computer plus I/O modules (RIO grande, CPU, mic preamps and so on so forth..)
I cannot comment on the sound as I have not used for any production,but in terms of servicing and spare parts it is unfortunately a dead end....
the only viable way would be to purchase a fully working one and then gather as many spare parts as you possibly can but again, SSL don't support it unless you sign a support contract with them...
anyway keep us posted on this, I have just uploaded an overview manual (all I have) on the forum, here is the link:
http://forum.sslmixed.com/index.php?topic=776.0Mattia.
EDIT:
I found a couple more PDfs which I have uploaded and they are in the thread above!