Harvey Tool on Using the Bantam Tools Fusion 360 Templates
Harvey Performance Company, parent company of the Harvey Tool, Helical Solutions, and Micro 100 tooling brands, is a close partner of Bantam Tools, helping to support the desktop CNC and PCB milling market with shared resources and easy access to high quality miniature carbide tooling.
Jeff Rauseo works as the Manager of Digital Marketing at Harvey Performance Company. Overseeing social media and industry partnerships is a large part of his job. In 2019, we partnered with Harvey Performance Company and provided them with one of our Desktop PCB Milling Machines for their corporate headquarters. Jeff shared his experiences of using the new machine and our Autodesk Fusion 360 templates. Check out what he had to say!
Over the past three years of working on the marketing team at Harvey Performance Company, it’s always been a goal to get a desktop CNC mill to use in-house for producing video content. While we have many partners and various testing sites across the country, it can be difficult (and costly) to get a marketing person with a camera to travel to each site. Plus, micro-machining with our smaller Harvey Tool products is often difficult to capture on larger machines–and many micro-machining shops have proprietary parts that can’t be filmed.
“I’ve been in quite a few shops across the US and Canada and have seen machines ranging from entry-level mills to more advanced ... The specs on this machine are impressive, with spindle speed higher than many desktop CNC machines I’ve seen in the field and a repeatability that’s hard to beat on a machine of this size.”
When Bantam Tools offered to supply our marketing team with their desktop CNC machine, we jumped at the opportunity. With a 26,000 RPM spindle speed, as well as high-precision performance and repeatability, the Bantam Tools Desktop PCB Milling Machine was a perfect complement to the Harvey Tool brand, which consists of tens of thousands of solid carbide miniature end mills, specialty tooling, and holemaking tools–many of which are under 1/8” in diameter.
Since many members of our marketing team don’t have a lot of experience with CAM programming, it was important that we had a mill we could use right out of the box. Luckily, that’s exactly what we received from Bantam Tools. Within just a few days, we were up and running, testing a new line of engravers in brass and getting some great video content. But engraving was the easy stuff, and we wanted to do more with our new desktop CNC machine.
To take the next step, we turned to Bantam Tools’ Fusion 360 templates. Bantam Tools developed the templates in-house for various materials and have been working with the Fusion 360 team to make them more accessible for the CNC community. The templates are actually now available in Fusion 360’s CAM samples folder! Given that Autodesk and the Fusion 360 CAM team are close partners with Harvey Performance Company as well, it was natural for us to jump into Fusion 360 and work with these templates to continue creating more videos and testing a wider range of tooling.
Upon downloading the Fusion 360 template from Bantam Tools’ website, we had our Desktop PCB Milling Machine cutting the first toolpath in under 30 minutes. We chose the HDPE template and used Harvey Tool’s extensive line of plastic cutting end mills to machine the entire part. The template was super helpful in how it laid out each toolpath and the suggested tooling, and editing speeds and feeds information to match our specific tool selections was a breeze. Harvey Performance Company also offers tool libraries designed for Fusion 360 for all Harvey Tool products (as well as Helical Solutions), so we were able to pull in accurate tool models from our own database when simulating the programs.
Moving from Fusion 360 into the Bantam Tools Desktop Milling Machine Software was simple. Bantam Tools has a how-to guide available for Fusion 360 on their site, so it was as simple as posting the toolpath, generating the G-code, and importing it into Bantam Tools’ software. Then all we had to do was touch off the tool, check our offsets, and click Start Milling–it was that easy.
Using the Bantam Tools Fusion 360 templates, I was able to complete this part from start to finish in just a couple of hours. My team was able to capture some great close-up footage of the milling process, and the tools performed spectacularly––nice finish! Check out the video below to see highlights from our project.
I’ve been in quite a few shops across the US and Canada and have seen machines ranging from entry-level mills to more advanced, multi-axis machining centers with all of the bells and whistles–which can run into the six-figures price range. In an office setting like our corporate headquarters, those kinds machines are not a reality. We needed something with a small footprint, power, and the precision to handle our smallest tools. And Bantam Tools’ Desktop PCB Milling Machine definitely delivered. The specs on this machine are impressive, with spindle speed higher than many desktop CNC machines I’ve seen in the field and a repeatability that’s hard to beat on a machine of this size.
By combining easy-to-use templates, intuitive software, and quality tooling, Bantam Tools has made it easy for anyone to enter into the world of CNC machining, opening the door to a new generation of makers.
If you’re new to CNC milling and programming and need a small machining center to help prototype designs, mill circuit boards, or to make precise small parts in a repeatable fashion, I would highly recommend checking out the Bantam Tools Desktop PCB Milling Machine. Even advanced machinists and large manufacturing centers could benefit from the precision of a Bantam Tools machine in their shop, and it’s a great educational tool to continue to advance the manufacturing field in vocational schools and technical colleges across the country.
If you’re interested in the tools mentioned in this post and in the video, you can purchase Harvey Tool end mills and specialty tools directly from the Bantam Tools website!
Learn more about the Bantam Tools Desktop PCB Milling Machine.
Learn more about Harvey Performance Company.