Bantam: 1 Me: 0
In this week’s edition of Critical Making, cnc milling was a doozy and I thought I couldn’t beat the Bantam Mill. The assignment was simple, use the bantam mill to cut out a 2D pattern on a piece of PCB. But the machinery nearly overcame me and not much wanted to work in my favor.
I began with a star pattern to engrave on the PCB, so I created the shape in Illustrator, turned it into a pattern and exported my svg. By making the shapes into a pattern that then is interpreted by Illustrator as a swatch, the mill could not locate the shapes to cut out.
So I went back to the drawing board. I ended up not liking other configurations of the stars and decided to simplify. Hexagons it is. Trial and error, trial and error and finally I was able to load a usable file into Bantam tools.
Easy enough, right? Round one goes into the mill and instead of engraving the shape, the mill cuts right through it. Just my luck…
Hit the e-stop, wedge the PCB out, and start again. Except this time, I changed the engraving depth to .001 instead of .006. Surely this will reduce the time, keep the machine from cutting out the hexagons and will engrave as planned.
The mill begins to do its thing, but then I realize, it’s cutting out the shapes again. It’s 90 minutes in of fixing, finagling, adjusting, correcting, only to bring the same result. I’ll blame it on the UI of the software because I couldn’t figure out if it was toggled on to cut or engrave. So I’ve made peace with it and now I’ll have a weekend craft for the historic blizzard to make some hexagonal fridge magnets. 🤷🏼♀️
But I didn’t want to give up just yet. So I tried it again and realized I was right, I had cut out toggled on instead of engrave (Bantam please fix this!). But I also didn’t want to wait two more hours to engrave the interiors of my hexagons. So I went back to Illustrator, expanded the shape outlines to fills, re-input the svg to bantam tools and… I thought I solved it. Two and half hours later, the pattern was still not cut out to my liking and I hope to not have to use the bantam mill again to be honest!
