How Crafters Are Making BIG Profits with UV Printing at Festivals

It is 94 degrees out. We are at a craft show and we're doing on demand printing using our Ankor Yuthi Make E1. And we're going to show you how we do it right now. [Music] like to do it. Build it or make it. So do we. This week we're taking our UV printing to the craft booth. We're going to be printing on site with our little U make E1 have printer will travel. But before we pack it up and take it on the road, we thought we'd share just a little bit of more about the printer and UV printing in general. So UV printing uses special UV inks, CMYK, plus a white ink plus a clear gloss or varnish ink. It also uses a UV light to cure those inks instantly. So, just like when you get your nails done, you're going to be putting your inks under the blue light and it cures them so that when it comes out, it is already dry. There is no wait time. Because it's UV inks, you could really print on any type of surface, wood, acrylic, metals, leather, glass, steel, which is still metal, and ceramic. Yuthi has a couple of different inks that you can use now. So, these are what we have in here now are hard inks or basically any hard surface, but they have come out with some soft inks so that you can do things like tote bags and things like that. It won't do t-shirts, but it will do some softer goods, canvas type stuff. It's going to be a hot one this weekend. It's supposed to be in the upper 90s, so we'll be testing this guy out in the extremes and taking it to the limits one more time. Step one, pack them up, move them out. So, the Yuthi Make is pretty small in size. It's 20.5 in wide, 16 1/2 in tall, and 14.2 in deep. And that must include its feet cuz it just doesn't seem like it's quite that deep. And it's only 44 lb. So, I can pick it up and lift it and put it here into the wagon. That's pretty easy. It is definitely lighter than our other UV printers that need between five and six people to move them. And there is no way we are bringing those to the craft show. No. Step three, time to print. We have our rei make all set up here at the craft booth and on our foldable table. Couple of things that you want to note. If you're going to take this on the go and have it outside or anywhere really, you want to keep it on a level surface. It does need to print on a level surface. So, our table here is pretty level today, so I don't think we have to do any kind of leveling to it. It's going to be great as is. You'll also want to make sure you keep it out of the sun. So, we are outdoors. The sun is UV light. That's what this thing does. It prints with UV inks and it cures with a UV light. So, you do not want to leave this machine and it cannot be left in a hot sunlight, direct sunlight. It won't print and it's possible it'll damage your print heads. The print heads have thousands of tiny little heads. It's pretty advanced technology and the sun beating down and the UV light could potentially cure any ink on the bottom of your print head. So, you definitely want to keep it out of the sun. This is a great tent for that because we have the overhang and we're in the shade today. So, this is perfect location to go ahead and try this test print outdoors. So, the Umake does communicate via internet. So, we are using Wi-Fi. What we have done is I set up a hot spot on my phone and then I've connected my laptop and the UI make to the hotspot on my phone and everything is being powered by the anchor solex here. So everything is kind of self-contained right here. It's just these three pieces of equipment if you want to count my phone. To put your machine in pairing mode, you're going to press the power button, hold it, it'll ding, and then you'll use your software. Well, I used I used my phone to find it via Bluetooth and then I was able to change the Wi-Fi on my Bluetooth to the Wi-Fi on my phone and then we just connected the laptop. Another great thing to note is that you can use the laptop and the software on the laptop, the desktop software, or you can use a mobile version of the software. So, I don't have to have the full laptop here. I can set this up because we're only doing personalization. I have a project set up in the app. It's saved in the cloud. I just open it. I have a choice of fonts at the bottom. I'll choose the font, put it on the image that we're going to take a snapshot of. Change the name and hit print. So, you can do it directly from your phone as well. I do think the laptop's a little more intriguing. It might pull people to your booth wondering what you're doing with these these two pieces of equipment. Now, we have our sign already set on to our large bed. This does come with a couple of bed, the small bed, the large bed. We have a large bed in here because we're using these 10-in door rounds. You can see there's plenty of room. I am leaving it hanging off the front side of the bed for a couple of reasons. One, it helps me level it so it's nice and straight on the bed. Also, we already have the hangers put on these so that we can make this thing pretty portable pretty quick. So, I'm leaving the ribbon and the hangers off of the edge of the bed because I want the printable surface to be the highest surface. I want that's the level I need the camera to catch when it does its height adjustment. So, we're going to leave the ribbons hanging off the back. So, we already have our design loaded into the software. I already have put my names in. So, I'm just going to hit snapshot here and let it go ahead and take a snapshot of the item, our substrate here, our sign, and then it'll do a height adjustment and then it'll update the camera so that I can have perfect placement for my words. Now, this is going to take about 90 seconds. So, while that's doing its little snapshot preview here, I thought I would tell you a little more about the Ankor Sollex power supply. I mean, I like this power supply mainly because of the five plugs right up front. There's six. Oh, there's six. There's six plugs right up front. Our other power supply only had one cord and we always had to keep a power strip with us if we wanted to run multiple things. Yes. So, this is nice that I I don't need to keep a power strip. It has six power outlets, two USB outlets, and two USBC's. It also has a car socket. Yep. So, that's an adapter so that you can charge from your car. Your car can charge this machine. It has a um emergency light. It flashes. It gets several sh um I don't know different tones. T Well, brightnesses. Brightnesses. Yeah. And it also is uh solar panel capable. So it comes with cables for two solar panels. You can charge this directly outdoors using the UV lights from the sun. And it will plug for an RV. So this port is not an RV port. It's like an expansion port because you can daisy chain these power packs. So you can add a power pack that'll sit right on top and add even more power to this unit. I'm just going to buy a couple of these and go ahead and power my house. Right. I mean, it's pretty solid. It is heavy. But if I had an RV, these would be great. Yes. It is the Anker Solex 1000. It is the same company that makes the UI make. It is Ankor UI. So, they sent us the power supply to give it a try here at the craft booth, and it's doing a great job. We had this outside the other day for 4 hours. Yes. And it charged not only the printer, it charged the laptop and our phones. Yep. So, two phones. And it was only at 72% when we unplugged it. No. No. When I got it back to the shop, it was at 72% when we plugged it in this morning. A couple of days later. So, at the shop, it was actually at 80%. So, in all of that time, it only used 20% power for all of the charging that it did, including this machine here. I mean, speaking of letting things sit, we've let the Yuthi make sit for 3 weeks without running it, and it was doing fine this morning, right? Well, that's a little something we're going to talk about with maintenance. So, let me go ahead and hit uh the snapshots's done. I'm going to go ahead and click print in the software. It's going to load it into the it takes it to the next screen, which is its print screen. And then I'm going to go ahead and hit print one more time. And we're just going to click start printing. Now, you do need to make sure you're choosing the right ink settings. So, ask me how I know. This is like any other UV printer. You can choose to have white ink only. White and CMK or white plus CMYK plus varnish. And then there's a couple of other options. There's all a couple of other combinations there. Our printer is ready to go. This print is loaded and sent to the printer. I'm just going to hit start. and let it do its thing. Like I said at the beginning, it is 94° out, so we are at the upper limits of the operating temperature for this machine. I think it's somewhere between 60° and 95° with a humidity of somewhere between like 30 80. Good job. Yes, 20 and 85. It feels like it's 85% humidity out here. And it is 94 degrees. So, we are putting it through its paces today and testing it. Yes. So, well, this is portable and it's going to be great at an indoor craft show. Oh, it'll be great at an indoor show. Taking it to an outdoor show like this in the middle of summer is really risky. Yes, it's really pushing its limits. So, if your whole booth is centered around personalization, you'll need to be cognizant of how hot it's going to be and how what the humidity levels are going to be uh at your event for any given day because I don't think Let's see. It's still about 12:00 here. If we were pushing 3, four, 5:00, I don't think it's going to work. It's just going to be too hot. All right, here we go. It's printing now. While this continues to print, we thought we'd share a couple of more features about the software. So, as Garrett mentioned earlier, we do need to connect this software to Wi-Fi. So, it is a cloud-based software. We are talking through the cellular network. It's running just fine through that cellular network. It's not laggy at all. So, I'm pretty impressed. Uh, with this software though, you get the option to choose from thousands of pre-made projects. things that have embossing on them, things that are just printing, the relief stuff, like a bunch of stuff. Yes, there's just so many different projects you can choose from. So, it's a great way to get started. Even if you're not a designer, you've got thousands of options out there for you. It was a great show. This thing did a great job at the show, but we did hit the upper limits. About 97 degrees, this thing started throwing an error that said high heat, high humidity. Well, like I shared at the booth, there is a temperature range of when it's optimal conditions, and we did reach that upper limit. We took it to its limits. We definitely did. But for us, that actually wasn't so bad. It wasn't so bad. A couple of minutes later, the sky opened up and the show was rained out. We saw the sky was opening up. Kim is a weather chicken. It got very dark. Very dark. So, as soon as she got that alert on her phone that there was uh inclement weather, she was like, "Pack it up. Let's get this thing out of there. Get it out of here. Yeah. All right. This is how the show ended. A lot of rain. So, this thing was the first thing. Back in the truck and then the rest of the time, uh, we just got wet ourselves. We got drenched. But, you know what? It was welcome because it was so hot. It made it was feeling it was we took our time. It felt great. That water felt great. But, not only is it portable, it's also super versatile. So, we have the full bundle here, which I highly recommend. So, not only can it print on a flat surface using its small bed, it also has the large bed, which you saw at the craft show, so that we can do larger items. Not only does it have two sizes of beds, it also has a rotary attachment so that we can do full wrap tumblers. And on top of that, it also has a laminator and it will use AB film to print and make stickers. So for one tiny machine, it does all the features of UV printing. It will also let you print a 3D embossing effect. So adding texture to your prints, so it's great for magnets. That's the first project we did was a 3D texture magnet. Garrett did this 3D textured coin. It will print up to 5 mm of texture or 3D print to your images. So, this machine is tiny but mighty. It does everything a UV printer can do, and I'm super excited to be able to share more and do more projects in the future. I wouldn't call it fast, though. I would say it's portable. I would say it's very versatile. I would not call it fast. It's well, it's not a speedy UV printer. I might be jaded. I might be jaded because of our big industrial machines, but it does do a lot of different things. So, if you're interested in getting into the UV game, this is a great way to do it. This is a great introductory machine that allows you to try out all the UV printing things that might be great for your little side hustle. You might want to do tumblers. You might want to do stickers. You might be printing and embossing on items. This little printer is going to let you do all of that. And you can get this. Not only can you purchase just the printer, but you can purchase several different size bundles or you can get the full bundle with everything. This is a great beginner machine because it is easy to use and versatile. The software is also easy to use. The RIP software is built right in. You can just print JPEGs, PNGs, whatever. regular images. You don't have to do any conversion because the conversion is done by the software. It does the raster image processing right there. So, it will send the machine code for you. You don't have to create a TIFF. You don't have to create a PDF. Just load and print. And if you want to do 3D texture, you don't have to learn how to do create 3D texture in the software. The software will do it for you. You'll just say, I want to make this a 3D texture. You just say how deep. Mhm. Yeah. And it does it for you. All right. Well, we are about out of time. I have to finish unloading the truck from the craft show. You have to go check out your Yuthi Make E1. This thing's pretty cool. Well, big thanks to the Make It Mafia. We love you guys and that is the best way to support this channel. Uh there's a bunch of things that go along with being a patron, right? We have Zoom calls, we have classes, we have free files, but the community is really what it's all about. I mean, those are the best people in the world right there. So, if you want some laser friends, that's where you can find them.