1 Hour Halloween Challenge: Can We Make Something Sellable?

What is up? Welcome back. We know you love to do a build it and make it. Kim is out of town. So this week I decided to give myself a challenge. I was going to give myself exactly one hour to come up with a brand new Halloween product. Not something that just works, but something that I could actually sell. I'm actually going to put a timer on it. One hour. And when the timer goes off, pencils down, it's over. And in the end, I'll let you know would I sell it? How much would I charge? And can I produce these efficiently? Step one. We're going to start the timer. Timer's been started. So we're going to gather all of our supplies. We're going to need some eighth inch MDF. This is what we're going to cut our design out of. We're going to need some Foxy Hughes paints because we're going to paint this thing. We're going to put it together with some Starbond thick. And we're going to need a little bit of acrylic. I have some scrap. I hope I can get what I need out of this piece. Step two. We're going to make our design. We're going to make our cut file and our print file. We're going to try to make a lantern with some interchangeable pieces. I'm down to 59 minutes. Now I'm going to jump over to our website, kngmakeit.com where we have this new little tool that helps me build lanterns. So I'm going to come down. I'm just going to do a five by five by nine. I want this something desktop. I'll keep all these. My material size is eighth inch. My insert. Yeah, I think that's correct for my acrylic. We'll leave it. I want three feet. These are the feet down at the bottom. This is going to be Halloween-ness. Halloween-y. Halloween-ish. So I'm thinking stick with the arch. Frame border. I'll leave it. I can use a solar lantern, but it gets dark real quick. We'll just put a square top on it. And my top height, we'll just say an inch and a half. We'll come down. So I do want some taller feet. So I'm going to go inside advanced settings. I'm going to come down to bottom foot depth and we'll just raise it up. We'll just say 0.6. Close this. Now down below, I can go check out my cut file. All right, everything looks correct. We've got the arch, yep. But now I want it nested because I want to save some material. So I'm going to enable product sheet nesting. And I'm using 24 by 36 for 18 by 36. We'll just use custom. Custom 18 by 36. Now generate layout. I'll come down below and it's already laid out all of my pieces. Here are my inserts. So sheet number one is actually my acrylic. And then up here, my structural sheet. This is going to be my eighth inch MDF. So I'm going to download my structural sheet and my inserts. Now while I'm here, I'm going to need something to print on these inserts. I'm going to go over to Envato. I'm just going to say Halloween. Halloween. Oop, I should have picked my category. That's too late. Photos. Ooh, what was that one? I was impatient. Now I'm burning time. I want photos. I want that photo. All right, we'll download that guy. This guy doesn't look bad. Download him. It's kind of spooky. Download him. We'll download him. I want something with some good jack-o'-lanterns. Ooh, I'll download him. He could look cool. He might look cool too. I'll download that guy. Ooh, look at this fatty. I'll download him. All right. Ooh, one more. Let's see. Nah, I think we're good. Unless something really catches my eye. Okay, I think we're done. Let's go check our time. Yeah, well, let's check our downloads. All right. So I have my two cut files and a bunch of things that I can print. All right, let's go check our time. Step three. We're going to make all of our cuts and do a quick time check. 53 minutes left. 53 minutes, 12 seconds. I'm going to take this eighth inch MDF and we're going to go throw it over in the laser. And I'm going to take this acrylic and go throw it in my other laser. I'll meet you inside Lightburn. All right, let's head over to Lightburn. Here's Lightburn. We're connected to laser three. Where's my downloads? Lantern sheet one. Is it this one? Nope, it's this one. All right, drag this guy down. Bam, bam. It's 17 inches tall. I know my board is 18 and by 36. So I'm just going to send it. Now we're going to head over to... Oop, I already took a picture. So now let's go back to my downloads and let's drag in my lantern pieces. Oh, they almost fit. I mean, should I risk it? I mean, I'm just going to do it. I'm going to do it. Oh wait, let's ungroup them. Ungroup, ungroup, ungroup. All right, let's boop, boop, boop, boop. Let's move these up. All right, I think that'll work. Move this down a little bit. I will say material. Do I see clear acrylic up here? Trans, clear, clear acrylic. Eighth inch, apply. Got it. I'm not removing it. We're going to cut it. We'll boot this down to 20 and process and start. All right, I'm going to hit start on both machines. Step four, we're going to make our prints. The acrylic's done. It was like a two minute cut. I still have a couple of minutes left on the eighth inch MDF. That was like a 10 minute cut. So I'm going to see if I can get these peeled off and put in the printer and get them printing before my other cut is done. All right, I'll meet you at the printer. Oh, time check. 42 minutes. All right, we can finish this one. We'll head over to the printer. I forgot how to do this. Oh, not connected. Hey, what's the X-Tool password? You don't know what it is? No. I'm filming a video about making a whole thing in an hour. And everything is going swimmingly. And I've spent 10 minutes trying to get into X-Tool. Now, the application, X-Tool Studio. It's Gmail. What? How do I get into support? What's the password to support? Okay, that's not it. Okay. No, that's not it. Nope. Oh, yeah, I swear I've tried that before. I'm in. Thank you. Yeah, I'm in. I'm in. It worked. Thank you. All right, bye. All right, now let's do smart mask subject. I don't think it's going to find a subject. Let's see. Hey, it found them. Great, apply. Now, we'll go back to our downloads folder. And we'll drag in some of these guys. Let's drag in these four. We'll just take these four guys. We'll drag them in. Boom. All right, let's do flat white. We'll do one pass white, one pass color. I don't want a whole lot of white behind here. Yeah, we'll just do one pass white, one pass color. Process. Let's see how long this sucker is going to take. What? 29 minutes. That's 30 minutes. I only got 30 minutes left. Oh, we're going to be cutting it so close. Step four, time to assemble. The printer is still printing. It's going to be close. So I don't know what time we have. I'm filming with my phone. But we're just going to snap this together. Now, I put these little teeny nubs in the files. So it'll stick together when you go ahead and put it inside the base. You'll actually hear it snap. You hear a snap? Look, and those little nubs hold it. That way, you don't have to fumble around with it when you're trying to hold it and assemble it all at the same time. That is a pain. Now, we'll just press all these pieces into place. Snap it in. That will be the other big one. Snap it in place. A little bit holds it. And then the last side, we'll just snap it into place. And now we'll just run a little bit of glue down the edge. Just a little drop of this glue. I'll just run a little bit of glue down the edge. Bottom edge here. Just a quick little stripe. And then just a little bit of glue will hold it. Now, I'm going to put the top on. This is my top. I'm just going to add a little glue around the edge. And then I have a little top on here. Now, there's these little tiny tabs here. These go in the bottom. There's some holes in the bottom. You'll see here they go in the inside. And these will keep the interchangeable pieces that we're putting in here tight up against the window. So we'll just put these in here. They also have a little snap to them. You can hear it. I'm still waiting on the printed pieces. But we're about ready. Step five. Time to paint. We're actually going to paint with some Deep Burrow and a paint sprayer. It's already assembled. It's going to be hard getting in all those little nooks and crannies. I'm just going to spray the whole thing. So I got about half filled with water. This is a Till's Wall Hornet. So this is a little paint sprayer. It's all compact. Here's the battery right here. You could do like quick swaps on the battery. We're just going to add some of the Deep Burrow to it. You probably do like 50-50. There you go. It's like 50-50. I'll give it a shake. All right. Looks like chocolate milk. And because I'll be spraying this acrylic paint all over the place, I will be masking up. Did I say we only got like 20 minutes left? So let's try to get this done quick. I'm trying to do two colors. So make it quick. I'm going to give this a minute to dry. And I'm going to go swap this paint for some different color. I gave it a quick rinse. I filled this with warm water. I let it run a minute. And then I put some water back in it. And we're ready for the apple stars. This thing's still looking wet. But that's fine. I want it to look like aged bronze. So I'm okay with it still being wet. I'm hoping these two paints mix a little bit. I'm going to go less than half on this guy. All right. So I probably be at about 60-40. 60% water. So I'm just trying to get that little bronze look to kind of peek through. Oh, I forgot to mix the paint. I'm back with the prints. But I got like 56 seconds. And this thing is still pretty wet. I almost made it. I think the long pole in the tent were the inserts. And the dry time on the paint. Maybe I didn't need to go two coats. But I almost got it dry with the hair dryer. But let's see what it looks like. I think it's dry enough where we could put the inserts in. So I guess step five. Now we add the accents. All right. So here are all my little inserts. See if they slide in. Now let's come back to those three questions from the beginning. Would I sell it? Yes, I would. I would sell this all day long. Especially during Halloween or Christmas because it's interchangeable. Let me just swap it out and put some Christmas in here. I didn't have time to print Christmas. I barely had time to print Halloween. But I could totally sell these. And how much would I sell it for? Well, all in. Let's see, all in. We're about $3.50 in MDF. We're about $5 or $5.50 in acrylic. And we're about $0.50 in paint because I thinned it out and sprayed it. I think the paint came out pretty good too. It's got that look that I like. I wish it would have ran a little bit more. I probably should have come back in and scored it with some water. Try to get it run. But it already took forever to dry. It said zero, but I'm going to say $0.25. And then glue, probably $0.10. So we're all in. We're all in for under $10. I would sell this all day long for $25 as the kit. And then I would sell like the lantern itself without the panels for like $10. And then the four sets of panels for like $15 a piece. And then you could keep them interchangeable. Easy $25. And then easy to produce. Yep. And I can knock out any type of like design in no time. It was quick to cut. 10 minutes to cut. I could probably fit four in my bed and cut them all in 40 minutes. I'd throw these pieces, these print pieces on the Logo Jet to speed up printing. I'd probably group those in groups of four or two. It would probably take 30 minutes to print 16 of these. So yes, I think this is, I think this is going to make it into the store. Well, I'm about out of time. I got to go make a bunch more of these before Kim gets back. And a big thanks to the Make It Mafia. That's the best mafia. It's all about the family over there. But we have files, Zoom calls, business content. There's just a bunch of extras over there. But it's really about the community. The community is great. You need something. The mafia's got you.