Other Machine Co. Changes Name, Logo, Apparently Nothing Else

September 6, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 59 Comments

The name Other Machine Co. is now dead. In a post to the company blog, Other Machine Co. is now Bantam Tools. This news comes just months after the announcement that [Bre Pettis], one-third of the founders of MakerBot, investor in Glowforge, and undeservingly the most hated man in the 3D printer community, purchased Other Machine Co.

Over the past few years, the Othermill, Other Machine Co.’s main product, has gained a reputation for being a very, very nice CNC mill capable of producing PCBs with 6 mil trace and space. Additionally, the Othermill was excellent at very fine CNC work including wax carving jewelry, very neat inlay work on wood, and any other CNC task that doesn’t involve anything harder than aluminum and can fit inside the machine itself.

As of right now, the only change to the Othermill is the name — it’s now the Bantam Tools Desktop PCB Milling Machine. According to a Wired press release, this name change also comes with a change in focus. Bantam Tools will not focus on hobbyist makers, but instead to professionals that need PCBs and other small milling jobs done right now. For the record, I cannot recall the Othermill ever being advertised directly to ‘hobbyist makers’ — it has always seemed the target audience was professionals, or at least people who would make money from the stuff produced on their mill.

Other changes to the Othermill have been in the works for months. Since the time of the acquisition, Other Machine Co. / Bantam have introduced a PCB probing system, a desperately needed fine dust collection system, and automated material thickness probing. These new projects for Bantam mills are compatible with the old Othermill.

[Bre Pettis] Buys Other Machine Co.

May 24, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 48 Comments

Other Machine Co., manufacturer of the very capable and very cool OtherMill Pro CNC machine, has been acquired by [Bre Pettis], former CEO of MakerBot. Under the terms of the acquisition, current CEO of Other Machine Co, Dr. Danielle Applestone, will remain in charge of the company.

We have a love affair with the OtherMill here at Hackaday. We have a few of them kicking around the Design Lab, and they’re great. Six mil traces are possible, and the OtherMill is a very reliable machine. We’ve taken a look at the OtherMill manufacturing process and liked what we saw, and we’ve invited [Danielle Applestone] to talk about the quest for the highest precision per dollar.

Of course, the newsworthy item for this, ‘rich guy buys a company’ story is who acquired the company. [Pettis] is most famous for being one-third of the original MakerBot team, a position that netted him about $130 Million after Stratasys acquired MakerBot. Stratasys’ acquisition of MakerBot has made a lot of people angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move. The history of MakerBot is not written yet, but the general consensus is that [Pettis] only played a very limited role in the downfall of MakerBot and desktop 3D printing as a whole.

Since leaving MakerBot for greener pastures, [Pettis] has put his money to work; he’s also an investor in the laser cutter startup Glowforge. While Glowforge has seen its share of troubles including a ridiculous policy on field-replaceable laser tubes, and perpetual delays for production units, Glowforge will be shipping soon. It’s unclear how the Glowforge will ultimately be received. But [Pettis’] continues to put his money where his mouth is (and into hardware startups) with this acquisition of Other Machine Co..

The Othermill Is Something Else

August 2, 2016 by Gerrit Coetzee 84 Comments

I’ll admit. When I saw the Othermill for the first time I thought it was just another mill with cheap Chinese hardware inside sold as a premium. I’m ashamed to say that I even trash talked it a little bit. It gave me another chance to relearn that I should always do my research before being a jerk, check my assumptions thoroughly, and even then it’s not recommended. Other Machine Company was kind enough to let me swing by the office in Berkeley California. [Danielle], the CEO, led me through the design of the mill as well as the challenges in running the operation.

The Othermill is a serious machine, and with the recent release of the Othermill Pro, it’s only getting better. The components are not bargain basement. This is something that could be more obvious, but it’s almost entirely made from US sourced parts, including the custom stepper motors. There aren’t any ball bearings that will start to make strange noises in a year. It can now cut 6mil traces in a PCB all day long. To put it into perspective. The Othermill Pro costs a third of the price of an equivalent machine from LPKF and has the same capabilities.

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Sourcing Your CNC Tools In 2016: Buy Them

December 30, 2015 by Sonya Vasquez 43 Comments

Hobbyist 3D printers have had a home in the maker space for years now. Along the way, they’ve left a mark in our imaginations. They’ve tickled our fancy for watching a computer orchestrated symphony written in G-code hum away while cranking out parts. They’ve opened a door to the idea that while computer controlled machines may be decades old, having one or two homebrew setups in our garage might not be as far-fetched as we first thought. Now that we’ve seen the steppers and linear slides that go into these setups, it’s not unreasonable for many of us to start asking: What else? Perhaps a computer numerically controlled (CNC) lathe, mill, or even a laser cutter–anything that would add to the vocabulary of tools and techniques that we’re starting to build at home.

VSlot linear rail system for building multiaxis linear actuator systems

Since 3D printers have become somewhat commonplace, it’s not too difficult to find commodity spare parts spilling to the surface of online vendors’ websites. We can even find kit versions for building our own variants. Now that the notion of CNC-at-home is here to stay, the question for 2016 is: do we build our own CNC tools or buy them?

Despite the countless CNC build logs, extruded aluminum kits, and open source G-code interpreters, I’m still convinced that unless your needs are truly custom, buying the machine that fits your needs will have you putting together projects faster and with far less maintenance than you’d need if you assembled the machine yourself. In what follows, I thought I’d explore a few machines that we can find today in 2016 that make the dream of desktop fabrication a reality.

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Danielle Applestone And The Story Of Every Othermill

December 14, 2015 by Sonya Vasquez 42 Comments

Many of us may qualify as “makers,” but how about a “maker of machines?” [Danielle Applestone] tells us what kinks to look for whilst embarking on your hardware startup adventure. Co-founder of Other Machine Co, the company that makes a PCB Mill that holds tolerances as tight as a thousandth of an inch, [Danielle] holds degrees in chemistry and materials science from MIT and UT Austin. While she may tell you that the math for running a hardware company is easy, knowing what numbers to crunch and keeping track of them has been part of her key to success. So take 20, and give yourself a moment to take in [Danielle’s] tips from her Hackaday Superconference talk on beating the hurdles ahead in the land of hardware startups.