Blacksmithing Vs. EngineeringFollow

I am a 215 Blacksmith Pally and am thinking about switching to Engineering to give me a bit more range with weapons...aka...bombs, net tossers and other fun trinkets.
1. is this a good idea?
2. can a human do gnomish engineering?
3. I have mining up around 225...will it be very easy to get eng. up quick?

Thx

1: IMHO yes
2:yes but if your objective is for ranged Wespons, then Goblin may be the choice for you, the net-o-matic is BoE not BoP, so they can be bought and sold, the biggest reason i see to do Gnome is for the death ray, that thing is realy unpredictable(buddie has killed himself 6 times with his) but it dose allow for a single pull(that can be difficult with a bomb), as a note the goblin sapper charge is good as is "The Big One" both goblin tree.
3: heck ya, as second poster said some stuff requires lots of gems and the like, but if you plan it out, dont buy all the schematics, dont overtrain, leveling engenering can be super eazy. The trick is to only build stuff with low reagent requirment, that means dont build guns(unless ya hit a spot where you cant get a skill add unless ya do, I never did, all the way up to the 200's bullets and explosives do the trick, start with rough stone and trun it in to powder untill you can make the copper bomb(remember engenering explosives dont sell Well per say, but i was able to recoup a lot of costs by selling the copper bombs back to vendors in large stacks.

So go out mine about 40 to 60 copper and just as menny rough stones... that will take ya to about 75 then you need some corase stone and tin, that will take ya to 125, then iron and heavy stone will do ya ok till 175 when solid ston3 is your bread and butter, as well as mith, with a quick run arround some lower levels(assuming you have some iron heavy stone and mith sitting arround)you could be back to 215 in engenering in about 5 hrs of game time(this assumes that you need to farm those early items).
Hope that helps