Bantam Tools: Small CNC Machines Yield Big Results

MCADCafe recently interviewed Bre Pettis, CEO of Bantam Tools about several things regarding his past and current endeavors that interestingly involve additive and subtractive manufacturing.

Pettis has had many personal and professional iterations during his career, but has always stayed close to design and manufacturing. Pettis is probably still best known as the co-founder and former CEO of Makerbot Industries, a 3D printer/additive manufacturing (AM) company now owned by Stratasys. He left Makerbot in 2014. In June 2017, Pettis acquired start-up Other Machine Co. — now known as Bantam Tools — from its founder and CEO, Danielle Applestone.

Bantam Tools builds reliable and precise desktop CNC machines. Since 2013, the company has been manufacturing desktop CNC machines for engineers and product designers enabling them to bring machining in-house and accelerate their rapid prototyping processes. Its CNC machines are also widely used by educators in classrooms and makerspaces. The company is on an ambitious mission to build an ecosystem of hardware and software products that will empower its users to create sustainable energy sources, fight climate change, land on Mars, prevent the next pandemic, and close the growing skills gap in U.S. manufacturing.

Bantam Tools strives to keep as much of its manufacturing in-house as possible, and its machines are assembled and tested in-house in Peekskill, NY.

MCADCafe Interviews Bre Pettis, CEO Bantam Tools

Bantam Tools CNC Machines

Bantam Tools currently has two products in its CNC milling machine line that include:

Bantam Tools Desktop CNC Milling Machine is a prototyping solution for rapidly machining aluminum parts. This desktop CNC has recently been improved with a new powder-coated steel exoskeleton, a deeper chip pan, and a higher Z-axis pitch. Its users are at the cutting edge of their industries and working to close the skills gap. This CNC machine supports 3-axis and 4-axis machining and is optimized to prototype aluminum parts. Cost is $6500 USD.

Hardware highlights:

• Black powder-coated steel exoskeleton
• Deeper chip pan
• Higher Z-axis pitch
• 1/4″ tooling
• 28,000 RPM spindle
• 7″ x 9″ x 3.5″ build volume
• 4th axis compatible
• Enclosure: Pre-assembled
• Overall Dimensions: 19.8” × 20.9” × 19.4” (machine fully enclosed)
• Working Volume: 7” × 9” × 3.5”
• Max Traverse: 250 in/min
• Spindle Speed: 10,000-28,000 RPM
• Spindle Motor Power: 250W, 1/4 HP at the motor output shaft
• Tool Holding: ER-11 collet
• Largest Recommended Shank Size: 1/4”
• Repeatability:  +/- .001”
• Power Requirements: 100-240 V AC 50/60Hz 350W

The Bantam Tools Desktop CNC Machine

Bantam Tools Explorer is a powerful and portable CNC Milling Machine. Weighing 42 pounds, this machine is lightweight, compact, and has a durable powder-coated steel exoskeleton. In short: The Bantam Tools Explorer CNC Milling Machine is made to move. You can machine functional parts in your office, lab, classroom, or pack it up in a Pelican case and solve problems on the go. Cost of the Bantam Tools Explorer CNC Milling Machine is $3,999 and is expected to ship by the end of 2022. 

Hardware highlights:

• Enclosure: Pre-assembled, fully enclosed
• Overall Dimensions: 15.75″ x 10.25″ x 15.25″
• Weight: 42 lb 
• Build Volume: 6″ x 4″ x 2.75″
• Max Traverse: 120 in/min 
• Spindle Speed: 10,000 RPM – 23,000 RPM
• Spindle Motor Power: 200W
• Tool Holder: ER-11 collet
• Largest Shank Size: 1/4″
• Repeatability: +/- .001″ 
• Tolerances: Holds .0036″/6″ 
• Power Requirements: 100-240 V AC 50/60Hz 350W 

The Bantam Tools Explorer

Takeaways from IMTS

Bantam Tools launched its new desktop Explorer CNC machine at IMTS earlier this year. Pettis said, “We had a really good time at the International Manufacturing Technology Show (IMTS), which is bigger than CES, except it’s not consumer stuff, so it’s all industrial and manufacturing products and services. We launched the Bantam Tools Explorer CNC milling machine, our new CNC milling machine that weighs 42 pounds, so it’s very lightweight. It has handles on it, fits in a Pelican case, and runs a spindle at 23,000 RPM, so you can do high-speed machining. Everything is designed and set up so that it’s easy to make aluminum parts on this machine. You can use other things as well that are easy to mill – as easy or easier to mill than aluminum, such as brass, wood, engineering plastics, and machining wax, all that kind of stuff as well as aluminum”.

“We had so much fun at IMTS because we were able to show our new machine that costs $4000 amidst machines that could easily cost between $100,000 to $1 million or more”.

“We also launched a major update to our trusted machine for the last two years — the Bantam Tools Desktop CNC milling machine, that has a bigger build volume, and runs at 28,000 RPM, and costs $6500”.

CNC Machines That Are Unique and Differentiated

When asked what makes Bantam Tools CNC machines unique and differentiated, Pettis said, “There’s a couple of things. CNC machining was one of the first applications for computing when in 1958 G-code was invented — it was one of the first applications for computing. Amazingly, we’re still using that same G-code today. When people buy a CNC machine and they use it for sometimes 20 or 30 years, they don’t necessarily want to retrain, so it’s been a pretty static industry, and not a ton of innovation. So what I like to do, and I did this with my previous company, MakerBot, is take something that’s really big, hard to do, and expensive, and make it small, easy to use, and affordable”.

“The impact that it has means that more people have access to it, it gives. For example, our customers, about half of them are impatient and demanding engineers. They want an aluminum part, they don’t want to wait for it, they get quotes on how long it’s gonna take for somebody else to make it for them, and usually that’s in weeks or months, and instead they call us up and ask, ‘Hey, can you send us a machine like next day air tomorrow? I need parts now.’ By taking responsibility, engineers, get to use our machine and then make parts that day, it allows them to iterate more, make more mistakes earlier, and make better products”.

Optimized for Machining Aluminum

 “Our machines are optimized for machining aluminum, and a lot of people ask us, ‘Well, can I do steel?’ Because we’re optimized for high-speed machining, with steel you’d either have to go to a much smaller bit to get the chip load appropriate for steel. And then steel is also ferrous, and we’re running a brushless motor that’s an open frame motor with lots of magnets in it, so you might be fine… it’s not a hard part to replace, but it would… if you made a bunch of steel dust in our machine, we wouldn’t be terribly unhappy. So it’s aluminum and really anything else that you can think of to fit in there”. 

“In some cases, people do use non-approved materials, so we had some people stop by and they make parts out of carbon fiber, and we said, ‘That’s not on our approved materials list,  and they said, ‘Why’?  And we responded, ‘Because it wrecks the machine,’ and they responded, ‘Well, it wrecks our half a million dollar machine, too, so we’ll just consider the Bantam Tools machine a consumable.’ And so they void their warranty, but it’s a different approach, right”? 

“We have this great mix of customers who are innovators, like SpaceX, and Tesla, Draper, and Northrop Grumman, and startups who are doing really interesting things in the drone delivery space and robotics. And then about half of our customers are skill builders, and these are folks who are either professors who have built out a makerspace or a workshop at their school to teach the next generation to get into machining, or they are places that are innovation spaces that have a workshop and just need to train the next generation up on machining and don’t wanna spend the time on their production machines letting the new kids wreck the machines. Our machines are very resilient, so they can definitely make mistakes in our machines that are much more expensive on the production machines, so. We’ve got really new customers too”.

“We did the research on the big machine and about half of the parts that people generally make on a CNC machine, a larger machine can make those parts and it just takes time off their big production machines”.

Trends in Manufacturing

“It’s a very interesting time in manufacturing because in the United States, I’m 50 years old so I’m probably the last generation that had metal shop and wood shop and had teachers that basically said, ‘Okay, you’re going to use machines that can cut your finger off’, and we’d all pay attention. I’m the last generation who went through manufacturing tech classes as a normal thing. They’re still out there here and there and when done right, they’re really awesome. And so when people think about manufacturing, a lot of times they think about manufacturing in Asia, and we’ve been in a trade war with China for a while, there’s a big feud that’s spinning up over Taiwan, where Taiwan is one of the best democracies in the world and China thinks is part of China”.

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“At Bantam Tools we make desktop CNC milling machines, and they’re affordable, easy to use, and we make them for world changers and skill builders” – Bre Pettis

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“Also, they make practically all the computer chips in the world. So I see in the near future people talking about onshoring and reshoring and rebuilding manufacturing, and I see that we’re gonna have to do this, and I don’t think we’re gonna do it by rebuilding the infrastructure that the US built for World War II. It doesn’t work. We know that’s not going to happen. We have to think about new ways of managing expectations if we think about what we want to do as a country and then get behind it. I think one of the jobs that the media and folks like you have is telling the stories in industry and manufacturing that are inspiring to the next generation, because one of the biggest problems everyone in manufacturing and the industry has is hiring people. There’s a little less than a million jobs in manufacturing right now in the United States that nobody is applying for, and it’s not that they’re not great jobs, they’re inspiring, a lot of them are innovative, a lot of them will train you up to do very interesting things, a lot of them are robotics, a lot of them are CNC operation”.

“We haven’t optimized our culture to get people inspired for that, so one of the big things that I see that needs to happen is we need to tell more stories about manufacturing and how exciting it is, and make it like a thing that the next generation wants to do. And we have to do whatever it takes to make that happen”.

Creating a New Manufacturing Appreciation Culture 

How do we create a culture where manufacturing is praised and valued? Pettit said, “I think a lot about that shop class that I was in when I was a kid. And it gave me a ton of self-esteem, I would make stuff, and when I was done, I would have a thing that I made and it was just a pretty satisfying. If you’ve ever fixed a bicycle or if you’re manufacturing and you make something and the tolerances are right and everything fits together right, it feels amazing. And this feeling is really powerful, and right now, there’s so many competing feelings, like there’s the competing feeling of how you feel when you win a video game, there’s a competing feeling when somebody like re-tweets your latest tweet or comments on your latest Instagram post, and these feelings are all now competing with feelings of manufacturing and making things. So I think what I see happening, and I’ll step us up a little bit back a little bit. One of my favorite quotes is by William Gibson, who’s a science fiction writer, and he says, ‘The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed’. So when I think about that, I think, Okay, who’s already living in the future, because somebody is”.

“If we can think about who the pioneers are, who are actually doing things that are a little bit different that are working and how can we amplify those things. I look at what’s happening in schools where. My previous company, MakerBot, which is a 3D printer company, and it was really exciting to see 3D printers enter the education space, and first you saw basically private schools saying, ‘Hey, we have a 3D printer at our school. Come sign your kid up to our school’. Now I’d say 10 years later, you’ve got public schools, and it’s a pretty ordinary thing for young people to have access to 3D printers. We need to expand that and include laser cutters and CNC machines to round that out. I believe with those three things, you can teach so much about manufacturing with a 3D printer, laser cutter and a CNC machine. And I think one of the reasons we lost shop class is because they were really big classes. Those machines in there, the lays and the mills, and the band saws and all those things were really big and massive, you needed a lot of space, and then the amount of insurance you needed to start having when kids do literally cut off their finger and that kind of stuff”.

“In an ordinary classroom, you can have these tools, because they’re small. They’re relatively affordable, and we sell to the schools and they buy one, they use it and then they come back and they buy another four. About five is the right amount to have in a classroom of Bantam Tools CNCs. And then all the students have access to this and they start making stuff and they make mistakes, they fix it, they do it again, it fits perfectly, the happiness feelings go off in their brain and the next thing you know, they’re hooked and they may find out they’re an engineer without even knowing it”.

The Future of Shop Classes 

“I think it looks like moderately ordinary classrooms with inspiring teachers and professors and access to the tools, and then it’s almost like, let’s see what happens. I think with 3D printing and now CNC machining, we see students going in, using these things and making things they need, whether it’s phone cases or key chains with their school’s mascot on them or in some cases, kids who are born with amniotic band syndrome, they’re making their own prosthetics. We’re just beginning to find out what students will do with this technology. And I think the future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed. It’s those classrooms that already have the laser cutters, the 3D printers, and the CNCs where we’re gonna get to see what the future looks like”.

Pettis was asked would  he recommend including mold making as well in these classrooms? “Yes, I think mold making is very interesting. Mold making is interesting because it’s something you can get into without actually having machinery. You can do really interesting stuff with alginate molds, which is the stuff that they use in the dental industry. You can do really interesting things with plaster molds. And then you can do interesting things if you wanna go into injection molding, which is sort of the next step after that. There are some small injection molders and things in that world, but I would say that injection molding space hasn’t really arrived to the small, affordable and accessible yet as far as I can tell”.

Bantam Tools is a unique company with products that serve a unique niche and led by a unique CEO who has come full circle during his career of helping create innovative additive and subtractive manufacturing processes.

For More Information: Bantam Tools

Tags: Bantam Tools, Bre Pettis, CNC, Desktop Machining, Video Interview

Category: Interview

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