Tips and Tricks: Making Lasercut Products with Basic Materials

Hey everyone, long time no see. Hope you're doing all right and staying safe out there. So I get a lot of questions about what materials to use in laser cutters, so I thought I could take you through some of the classics while I make four different laser cut products. So we're going to do a wooden treasure chest, an acrylic weekly planner, very simple leather wallet and a little paper card animal. And while obviously these aren't the only types of materials that you can use, they are some of the most accessible and they're great to use if you're just getting started. I'll also include all of the cut files as a free resource for you to download, just because we're not going to have time today to cover the whole design process for each one of these and I don't want anyone missing out on anything. So yeah, let's get started with the treasure chest and we'll begin by prepping our materials. I'm using three millimeter bamboo ply for this one, but anything from MDF to hardwood could be used here. And I'm actually going to apply my finish of wipe-on poly first because it's much quicker to do that now before it's cut into a bunch of little pieces. After it's dry, I cover the top of the ply with masking tape to protect it and place it in my machine over the nail bed. I prefer to use the nail bed here just because it's less likely to cause flashbacks on the underside of the material like the honeycomb bed does. In RDworks, I could bring the file in and make sure it's scaled to the thickness of the plywood I'm using. In this case, it's actually a little bit over three millimeters, so I just want to scale it up a touch so the slots will fit in okay. And you can see that this is just a simple cut file. So long as I set my one layer here to the correct cut settings, I'm good to go. If you don't know what settings to use, there's no real magic trick. It's just a matter of spending some time to find what combination of speed and power works for each material and your machine. Typically, I just use a piece of scrap and work my way through the options. After I remove the masking tape, it's time for assembly. In terms of product viability, this is where you'll lose a lot of time. If you can charge a high enough price for the assembled product, then that's fine. But I think maybe the better way to go about it is by providing this type of thing as a kit set with instructions. That way the customer gets the fun of putting it together and you've saved a bunch on production costs. Next up is the weekly planner. This one's made from 4.5 millimeter clear acrylic and comes from the factory with protective sheets applied on both sides, so that makes things easy. In RDworks, you can see that this file is a two layer setup because we want the text and the dividing lines to be engraved and then the perimeter to be cut out from the sheet. Just quickly, the laser has two modes of function. The vector movement, which is what we saw before, where the laser head follows the lines that we've drawn, and a scan movement, where the laser head moves back and forth and fills an area in, which is what we're going to do for the text here. And I want to make sure I run the engraving first, otherwise the cut piece might move on us and mess up the text alignment. Also, the text is backwards because we want the engraving to be on the reverse side of the acrylic, so that when it's being used in the real world, the whiteboard marker tip doesn't catch in it. One of the things you'll immediately notice is that running an engraving process is less efficient time-wise, so use it sparingly and make sure it's worth it. For example, covering this entire sheet with engravings would take 10 times as long on the machine, so you need to be adding 10 times the value in the final product price. Now let me show you how this product works on a mock-up piece. The thing that actually turns this into a refined item are these little guys called standoffs, and what they allow you to do is screw the base piece into the wall and then mount the acrylic over top, giving you a very tidy finish. So while the acrylic on its own is a little plain, it can be elevated by the simple use of the right hardware. Okay, on to the leather wallet now. So I'm using a piece of three to four ounce veg tan leather, and once again I've used masking tape to protect the surface from the laser. This time around I'm going to be using the honeycomb bed, which in combination with some magnets is going to keep everything nice and flat. This is just a single layer cut file, which we know how to handle, but just double check that the laser will go through and cut out all the stitch holes first and then cut out the piece, because the leather will move a bunch once it's cut and that could be really unfun. Generally the laser will seal the edge of the leather pretty well, but I just like to give them a quick wipe down just to make sure I remove any residue or slight charring. You can see the difference having the masking tape on top makes. It's much easier to do this than try and clean the leather after. I apply contact adhesive around all the stitch areas and then press the pieces together, being careful to make sure everything's still aligned. I think leather goods made with the help of laser cutting are extremely viable, especially if you get good at stitching. While the laser will never be as fast as punch die cutting, it doesn't require anywhere near the same tooling costs, which makes it perfect for small batch production runs and especially prototyping. This is just something I've been dipping my toe into lately, but I'm really enjoying it and looking forward to learning more. All right, the final item for today is a paper card animal. I'm hoping you can guess that this is a kiwi bird, the national icon of Aotearoa New Zealand, but if you can't, that's okay, I realize I might be slightly biased. The cardstock I'm using is 270gsm. Anything lighter than that will probably fall apart on you. For this file we're doing a two layer setup, a light low power pass just to score the fold lines and then a pass to cut the pieces out. Lasers can actually have trouble cutting extremely lightly because laser tubes need a minimum power output to even fire up, which is sometimes more power than what you ideally want. So a little trick here is to set the laser slightly out of focus to reduce the power for scoring these lines. Like the treasure chest, I think this would work best to sell as a kit set with instructions as the assembly is rather time consuming and a lot of the enjoyment is in putting it together. So a great opportunity again to kill two birds with one stone, though kiwis are an endangered species so you probably don't want to wear it like that. I know none of these items are particularly life changing, but I'm hoping they help spark some ideas of your own. If you're interested in building your own laser cutter like this guy behind me, I've got a whole build series showing you how to do that which you can check out. I'd also just like to apologize for not uploading anything for so long. As I know you can appreciate, it's been difficult to prioritize making videos with all the challenges we've been facing, but I am hoping to do some more in the coming months. Also, you might notice the background's changed a little bit. In short story short, I'm just leasing a small corner of space from a local workshop, so if you hear any other noises or anything happening, that's all that that is. So yeah, that's it from me today and I will catch you on the next one, hopefully a little sooner than last time.