Bantam Tools Blog

You know what they say: A team that mills together has fun together! Here at Bantam Tools, we not only put pride and passion in every precise, reliable Bantam Tools Desktop PCB Milling Machine we make, but we enjoy ourselves in the process. We're fortunate to have a wonderful team, and we host regular Project Nights where we can hang out in the workshop and, well, make projects. We recently hosted one at our Berkeley, California headquarters. Here are some snapshots.

The newest print offering from the folks at Raspberry Pi, based in England, is HackSpace magazine, billed as the "monthly magazine for the modern maker." The current issue, 11, focuses on best maker hardware and features a great review of our Bantam Tools Desktop PCB Milling Machine by Hackster's Alex Glow.

Name cutouts are a simple way to personalize a gift and further customize your project. Plus, they're always fun gifts for loved ones. With some milling knowhow and the power of your versatile, precise Bantam Tools Desktop PCB Milling Machine, you can take control and make them yourself.

Our Bantam Tools Desktop PCB Milling Machine's middle name is PCB, and while it can easily mill a wide variety of materials—from wax to metal to wood—what it's best known for is empowering you with the ability to precisely and rapidly mill professional-quality printed circuit boards directly from your workbench. Forget using toxic chemicals to etch your circuits or sending files to a board house and losing momentum on iteration while waiting. Design, mill, test, iterate, repeat. Our Bantam Tools Desktop PCB Milling Machine gives you the clear advantage. 

Bantam Tools community member Roberto Lo Giacco, who’s based in Rome, Italy, recently shared a neat custom fixture he milled with and for his versatile Bantam Tools Desktop PCB Milling Machine. Milled out of Delrin, one of the best performing engineering plastics, the fixture firmly holds four aluminum dog tags at once. He also wrote up his R&D process and shared all his design files on his site. 

Roberto and his friends are working on a project for the upcoming massive Maker Faire Rome event taking place in October. The project requires them to mill a couple hundred dog tags. While the reliable Bantam Tools Desktop PCB Milling Machine can handle that with ease, fixturing one at a time would be quite time consuming. Roberto just made the task four times faster with a little ingenuity.

At Bantam Tools, we’ve been making high-precision, accessible desktop CNC mills for years, so it’s no surprise that we love all things CNC-related and glean inspiration from many forms of making. Being aficionados of precision, we've recently been mesmerized by the works of renowned Bay Area puzzle maker Lee Krasnow of Pacific Puzzleworks. Krasnow is widely regarded by puzzle collectors as one of the world’s best designers and craftsman of interlocking geometric puzzles and secret opening boxes. We reached out to gain insight into how he got started, as well as his tools, techniques, and challenges.

It's safe to say that most folks seek shelter when faced with extreme adverse weather, but that's not the case for ChasinSpin. The quest for capturing storm images doesn't come neatly wrapped in a box. Instead it's driven by innovation, and ChasinSpin employs the Bantam Tools Desktop PCB Milling Machine to create custom PCBs for his custom-built tools. Intrigued, we caught up with ChasinSpin to learn more.

Heads up: We're running a PCB challenge where everyone is a winner! Here at Bantam Tools, we love all things CNC-related, and we celebrate the fact that our versatile, reliable Bantam Tools Desktop PCB Milling Machine can handle a whole host of materials — from metal to wood to wax and plastic — like a champ. With it's professional precision (6 mil trace & space!) and accessibility, though, where it really shines bright is in milling printed circuit boards. After all, the Bantam Tools Desktop PCB Milling Machine's middle name is PCB.

Open-source hardware company Adafruit is known for their impressive library of project tutorials, and one of their newest offerings is a neat little TouchTone Synth with custom PCB milled on the Bantam Tools Desktop PCB Milling Machine, designed by Noé Ruiz. The project employs Adafruit's Circuit Playground Express (their all-in-one board that has sensors and LEDs built in, with no soldering required), Microsoft's MakeCode (free web-based code editor for physical computing), and the custom PCB milled on the Bantam Tools Desktop PCB Milling Machine to make sweet music. Fun!

Ever since Eddie Serratos shared his full step-by-step instructions on how to make an Overdrive Guitar Effects Pedal using the Bantam Tools Desktop PCB Milling Machine, we've been wowed by the variety of boxes he creates, as seen on his Instagram page. Not only do these boxes serve their functions well, they're also great examples of CNC eye candy due to the beautiful engravings he adds to them. We reached out to Eddie to find out how he does it, and he said that the single most important step is accurately measuring the box. Here he shares his tips with us.