Alphason stands are generally tough and well made. I use an Alphason hifi rack and its brilliant.
On the subject of bargain hi-fi, there are some excellent items to be had on Ebay as long as you are careful about which sellers you buy from. I've been doing something similar to you. I picked up some Quad 11L speakers for £150 which are incredibly good and in excellent, barely used condition. I've also picked up some great electronics and will be spending the next couple of weeks choosing which to keep as my main system feeding the Quads.
There are some brilliant bits of kit out there that can still give current stuff a difficult fight - Pioneer A400, Marantz PM6010SE KI Signature, earlier Cyrus amps, Marantz CD63/SE/KI-Signature, the Pioneer Stable Platter CD players (PD-S703 springs to mind), Rotel's 90s CD players (RCD-965BX in particular).
Its good, relatively cheap fun building a system in this way andd the results can be quite astounding. The CD players are a bigger risk than the amplifier because of the moving parts, but some of them still sound special all this time later, and the stakes aren't that high in terms of initial outlay.
Good luck and have fun building your system. More news on mine when I've spent some more time listening!!