What it's about: A CNC-machined aluminum fixture plate that lets a Bantam Tools desktop CNC mount a 4th-axis rotary unit. Bantam discontinued the original accessory and no longer sells the pallet, so this is a from-scratch replacement built to the same mechanical interface mounting bolt pattern, touch-off reference feature, and pallet-to-bed locating; geometry machined to work as a drop-in for anyone else stuck with the same dead-product problem.

Why I made it: I sourced a compatible 4th-axis drive/motor assembly for my Bantam machine, but the actual bottleneck turned out to be the accessory pallet; the plate that physically bridges the 4th-axis unit to the machine bed. Bantam doesn't sell it anymore and wouldn't share full drawings (fair enough, discontinued product, no support obligation), so I worked the problem the way I'd work any reverse-engineering job for a client: went direct to their support for whatever partial data they'd part with, cross-checked it against the one hardware fact I could verify myself (actual thread size on the mounting bolt), and built the design around confirmed dimensions instead of guessed ones. It's a small part, but it's the exact kind of "vendor discontinued the one part that makes everything else work" problem that shows up constantly in manufacturing and diagnostics work.

How it works: The pallet bolts to the machine bed via a locating-pin interface, and the 4th-axis unit bolts to the pallet through a 5-hole pattern using M5x12mm screws torqued in sequence for even clamping. Because the 4th-axis hardware occupies the space where you'd normally touch off a tool against the flat pallet surface, the design includes a dedicated touch-off block — a raised reference feature at a known height above the pallet top, so tool-length/work-zero calibration stays accurate even with the axis hardware in the way.

Images/video: To be added once the part is cut, assembled, and running! More to come.