Pantheon's Odyssey

"You don't actually trust something unless you trust it with your life."

A Motorcycle A Day

Early morning on a Monday, and Bob and his team were doing jumps in the street outside their workshop. Hours earlier, sometime before midnight, Bob had assembled a mini electric motorcycle entirely from parts he’d 3D printed himself. Designed over the weekend. Printed by day. Assembled by night.

Bob is the CEO of Pantheon, which makes 3D printers. They design their own machines, concoct their own filament chemistries, and can now produce parts as strong as metal.

These are impressive feats in their own right, but for Bob, they’re just means to an end. The end is to get to a motorcycle a day. “How do we print a motorcycle in one day? That's the only constraint we've ever been building towards,” says Bob.

The minibike is a big step in that direction, but it’s not enough. “I have to build a big one. I have to be able to race it.”

For years now, the additive manufacturing world has had difficulty shaking the impression that 3D printers are desktop tools for high-performance hobbyists. This is the misconception Pantheon is fiercely trying to correct. A motorcycle a day isn’t just proof that Pantheon can print fast, it’s proof that they can make parts you’d trust with your life.

Pantheon’s e-bike.

Bob’s story began somewhere in the interior of British Columbia, where, as a kid he raced and crashed mountain bikes, hid broken bones, and made a habit of outrunning perceived limits. Today, it’s that same allure for speed and irreverence toward risk that define the DNA of Pantheon, whose arc has taken it from a small print shop run out of a shed in Kelowna, to a company steadily building the manufacturing future we’ve been waiting for — just-in-time, software-defined, and massively scalable. The moving assembly line on steroids.

From Solenoids to Shogun

Pantheon literally started in a shed, by the way. Working as software engineers by day, Bob and his co-founder Alex moonlighted as bike repairmen by night. They quickly realized that a lot of the parts you need to fix vintage motorcycles simply didn’t exist anymore, and if they did, they had a habit of failing in spectacularly dangerous ways.

One such part was a valve designed in the seventies that controlled the flow of fuel from the gas tank to the engine. It relied on a diaphragm and a vacuum line, connected to the engine, to open and close. Unlike in the seventies, modern gasoline is now increasingly blended with ethanol, which turns out, is corrosive to the diaphragm, leading it to dissolve and in some cases, spilling the entire contents of the fuel tank into the engine crankcase.

To fix this, they sourced a compact fuel solenoid from a vendor in Asia, and built an electronic version of the valve. They handmade each one, with just an angle grinder and a drill press, and sold twenty of them to vintage bike enthusiasts in Kelowna.

The shed where it all began.

That worked pretty well, so they figured they’d try their hand at making versions of the parts that were discontinued too. Of course, they would need more than just an angle grinder to make those, and also — they were broke. At the time, they couldn’t afford traditional processes like CNC machines, and doing everything manually was hard. That’s when the light bulb moment happened — what if they just 3D printed the parts instead?

Gradually, their repair shop turned into a product studio and in 2018, Bob and Alex quit their day jobs with the hope of “building shit and hopefully paying rent.”

After all, terrible products and outmoded production processes weren’t just a feature of the vintage motorcycle world. You’d be hard pressed to look around and find a product that couldn’t be improved through better design and smarter manufacturing. Bob and Alex took the skills they’d honed working on bikes — mechanical design, finite element analysis, CAD, and rapid prototyping with 3D printing — and turned them into an advantage. They’d use digital tools to create better designs and bring them into the physical world faster than anyone else could.

This skill set really came in handy during COVID, when ventilator shortages were hitting hospitals the world over. It just so happened that business in the Alberta oil industry was slow at the time, and Bob wondered if the surplus equipment used for pipes, fittings, and control valves could be repurposed for ventilators. They stepped in, designed a turbine ventilator from scratch, and got it certified by Health Canada. Typically, medical device approvals take years, but Pantheon speed ran the process in a matter of months.

Thankfully, COVID ended shortly after. But that also spelled the end of the ventilator business. So — what was next?

The answer, in a word, was props. Pantheon’s backyard was “Hollywood North,” a moniker given to Vancouver as it offers a cheaper filming alternative for productions looking to capture an urban, metropolitan, or forest backdrop on a budget.

Of course, breaking into the entertainment industry is one of the most challenging professional feats around, but the studios were nearby and had cash to spend. It was worth a shot. Bob and his co-founders figured they’d try breaking in the scrappy way.

“You can go to any fancy place wearing trade clothes and just chain smoke, and no one talks to you or questions you,” Bob tells me. “You can just pretend to be a class below the people around you, and suddenly you’re invisible.”

The reflector vest would be Pantheon's Trojan Horse into Hollywood. “We just drove around to studios and we just did the whole ‘bring a clipboard with a box of our parts, wear a high-visibility vest, and look busy’ thing. If people questioned us, we just kept walking. We ended up walking into enough film sets that we met a few directors and prop masters.”

In film, there’s typically a hierarchy. You’re supposed to work your way up, but as usual, Pantheon just kind of skipped that. The first movie they worked on was The Adam Project with Ryan Reynolds and Shawn Levy. They did the design and manufacturing for most of the objects the actors held in their hands — and they still managed to upsell. They started pitching Shawn Levy to make certain props and effects practically rather than editing them into the film in post-production.

Their work caught the attention of the master prop maker Dean Eilertson and director James Gunn, and soon they were printing everything from John Cena’s helmets and weapons to the creepy butterflies and spaceships in Peacemaker. Their business really took off when Shogun asked them to 3D print all the carved wooden detailing as part of the Osaka Castle.

They were printing thousands of these parts for the castle, and as a byproduct, they were printing cash, getting paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for components that only cost a couple thousand dollars to make.

The work was cool, it was lucrative, but it didn’t scale. If they kept going down this path, Pantheon’s now team of four, Bob, Alex, Casey and Logan, would be stuck making orders for an industry that can be remarkably feast or famine and incredibly zero sum. “You’re not creating anything new,” Bob says, “You’re just fighting for what exists.”

Better Printers & The Cloud Factory

In the background, Pantheon was building printers that could support their work for the film industry. They needed their parts to be durable enough to stand up to whatever abuse might come from props being dropped, thrown, or smashed.

The first part they investigated was the filament itself. Outside of unreliable filament vendors, there were a whole host of things important to depositing plastic that nobody was doing quality control on. So, Bob & Alex started making their own filaments, and in the process, teaching themselves chemistry to do so.

The next obvious challenge was the deposition process itself. All the extruders on the market, the component that feeds and melts plastic filament to deposit material layer by layer, were open loop. This meant that the printers had no built-in feedback mechanism to confirm that the extruder was in the right location, printing according to spec. It also meant that if you bumped into your printer during a print job, it would have no way of detecting this, leading to inaccurate prints. While this might be acceptable for affordable 3D printers built for rapid prototyping, the Pantheon team began to wonder if there were better engineered solutions out there that could print precision parts reliably. They bought the most expensive machine they could, hoping they could reverse engineer a better solution but found that even the $180,000 systems didn’t push quality to the level they were expecting.

What was needed was a huge improvement in the degree of precision the printer was built with, starting with the printhead and its sensors, controls and software. They introduced new sensors to detect the force the nozzle was applying to the part, a previously-ignored critical variable. They experimented endlessly with different configurations of temperature sensors to get the most accurate and consistent read on the plastic melting process. They experimented with printhead construction methods to maximize stiffness and responsiveness without sacrificing weight.

But the problem wasn’t just in the printhead — it was in the motion system itself, so they turned their attention to that. Drawing from their years in the design shop, and experience with everything from repairing trains to optimizing control systems in pulp mills and municipal water plants, they started rethinking how motion, frequency response, and accuracy could be engineered from the ground up.

What started as a tweak became a teardown. It was, as they put it, “a five-year-long rabbit hole.”

They were also, inadvertently, solving the biggest technical challenges plaguing industrial 3D printing — part strength, dimensional accuracy, and most crucially for scale, repeatability.

Traditional manufacturing achieves repeatability through rigid quality assurance systems, like ISO 9001, which certifies a company’s ability to consistently produce parts that meet customer and regulatory requirements. But ISO 9001 doesn’t certify the parts or the machines themselves; it certifies that your process is well-defined, well-documented, and tightly controlled.

Pantheon wanted its printers to bake that kind of reliability directly into the machine. The ambition was to make 3D printers that didn’t need a finely tuned human workflow or an ISO-certified factory floor. They wanted machines that could be dropped into any environment and still produce production-grade parts, over and over again. If, on top of that, you could make such machines economically, with software-defined repeatability baked in, then you’ve not just produced a better printer — you’ve created a new, massively scalable manufacturing process.

Consider the world of software, where you can develop an application locally, and in the next second, launch it to a million people on AWS because the code that runs on your laptop and the code that runs in the cloud is identical and will produce the same output every time. You can scale the number of servers running the code up or down with no changes to the fundamental program.

Manufacturing doesn’t work that way. The process that you run needs to change at every level of scale. If you prototype a part at your workstation and want to do a larger production run, you have to work with a manufacturer to develop a new process for that. If you want to scale up beyond that, you might need to redevelop that process again entirely, at a new factory.

Bob believes Pantheon might have cracked the scale-up bottleneck in manufacturing. Today, a customer can rapidly iterate on a prototype using a Pantheon machine in-house, and when the customer lands on a design they like, they can churn out hundreds or thousands of them at Pantheon’s factory, because the machines and processes they run are literally identical. “It’s software-defined behavior running the same software on a machine that can validate itself to be the same as the standard,” says Bob.

Because Pantheon’s systems are so productive, in terms of space, speed, power consumption and labor cost, an order of 10,000 units might only require capitalization of a few tens of thousands of dollars for new hardware. This is particularly lucrative when the parts are in the tens to hundreds of dollars an order.

“I think we might have invented something called the cloud factory,” says Bob. “By creating enough software-defined behaviors, you can make one or a million of something and it makes no difference. 3D printing scales with our technology really, really well.”

So — what does this all mean and where does it all go? Well, it starts to look like a world where hardware is no longer hard. It starts with 3D printing, but it doesn’t need to stop there. “Right now, 3D printing at Pantheon is this amazing lights out process for manufacturing thermoplastic composites, but I want to just hit a button and make whatever I want. It doesn’t matter if it’s 3D printing, additive, subtractive, photolithographic, whatever. I don't really care. I just want making an entire product to be hands free.”

Designing for the North Star

On April 8th, Pantheon released HS-Pro, their newest generation printer. It’s twice as fast, has double the build area, and prints parts twice as strong. They’ve also added rotational movement to the print bed itself, meaning the bed can now pitch, yaw and roll, in a software defined way to level itself. In the future, this added capability will allow Pantheon to do multi-axis tool-pathing.

Pantheon’s HS-Pro.

It gets them one step closer to a machine and a process that can finally print a motorcycle a day, and not just one, but hundreds.

This goal tests all of the metrics they care most about: better materials, higher accuracy, greater speed and even better repeatability.

One can then ask, if the bike crashes during a race, what should repairs look like? Should the race team bring a whole bunch of spare parts, or should they bring a few printers into the paddock to print out components as needed?

“Having an experience describe the North Star versus a spec sheet is so much more useful,” says Bob. That experience, of racing what you just printed, and building high-performance hardware wherever it’s needed, reveals the deeper ambition behind Pantheon. It’s not just to build a better 3D printer, but to rewire the logic of manufacturing itself.

We hope you enjoyed this first story in the “How It’s Built” series. If you’re excited about the future of building in the physical world, please subscribe and share this with someone who should be reading along. We’ve got more coming soon!