😁👀Making Leather Patches For Hats and Apparel With Your Co2 Laser Engraver-How It's Made!

so you got some leather and you got a laser and you want to make a laser cut laser engraved patch out of leather cool wait you want to make a laser cut and laser engrave patch out of leather and you want to put it on a hat okay let's do that today at laser engraving 9-1-1 we're gonna show you how to do exactly that so kick back get your notebook out cuz here it goes laser engraving 911s about to drop some knowledge on you and show you how to make leather patches and put them right on the hats let's do it okay so making a leather patch with your laser and mounting it on hat where do you start well I always start with the artwork we've got to actually make the patch in our art program and that for you could be Adobe Illustrator it could be CorelDraw to be there's a lot of different art programs out there today we're gonna be working with Adobe Illustrator so let me show you how I get my patch file ready before we even throw in the laser engraver so what I've got here is I've got two vectors we've got this little bass fisher guy and i've got this made in the USA vector and it's important that these are vectors you don't want to be using JPEGs or some other thing you want to be a be able to use this format where we can reshape resize without any loss in fidelity so I'm gonna set my width on this to four inches for this patch right here I noticed that on regular trucker hats and snap backs and stuff I don't like to go wider than four inches and no taller than like three inches I try to keep it within that so for this one for this patch I'm going to go four inches wide and it's about 2.1 inches tall so here's the process for creating the contour cut line that your laser needs to see to cut the contour of the patch now you could make a patch where you just you know make it a general shape like you could draw yourself you know a patch shape right and then you could like you know bring in the corners a little bit and be like okay that's my patch shape and that's my patch cut line right there and I'm just going to put my my my logo or whatever it is right in there that's that's fine too you can create shapes this way or circles but that's not what this is going to show you how to do what I'm going to show you how to do is make a contour cut line so it'll follow kind of the shape of the outline of your art like a die cut patch almost so first thing we're gonna do here I'm going to zoom in a little bit I'm going to hold down alt I'm gonna select this you made in the USA I'm gonna hold down alt and make a copy slide slide it over then I'm gonna go to object path offset path and I'm going to set my offset to zero point one zero inches which i think is good for this you can mess with your with your offset that's how much how wide it is so see if I put this up to zero point three zero and do a preview that's huge it's like a huge space between the actual art and where the laser is gonna cut so I for this particular one I'm going to need this particular art I'm going to do 0.10 I'm gonna select joins round that means that all the edges will be round instead of mitre it's like you know hard squared off I want to kind of round it and then I'm gonna click ok and what I'm left with is this shape and you might see that there's still all these lines in here there's maybe some little spaces in here we're gonna fix that right now by highlighting our our shape that we just created going over to the Pathfinder tool and clicking merge and then we're also gonna click unite and you see when I click to unite it got rid of those little spaces in there and what we're left with is this offset contour of our original artwork now I don't want it black filled so I'm going to come up here to my little color swatch I'm gonna hold down shift I'm gonna select no fill and then I'm gonna put a stroke and this is really important at least for my system and most systems is I'm going to set my stroke for this look this shape we just made at point two if you look really close we've got a really thin line and Carell and epilogue laser they see this as a hairline so Carell sees this as a hairline which in turn when we put this into CorelDraw and then feed it to our laser hair lines are viewed as cut lines you don't need to color them red or whatever it just needs to see the most important thing is it needs to see a hairline and not a thicker stroke than that so now that we have our contour shape here we're gonna take our original graphic here I'm gonna highlight both of them I'm going to come up here to the alignment tool and I'm gonna center align and then horizontal align and if you look now what we have is a patch file so we've got our art that'll be engraved on the leather and we've got a nice clean cut line right here that's gonna cut it out now either you might be thinking oh well I don't I don't want all these little ridges and stuff and that's fine you may have to go in with your pen tool and straight you know draw a straight line and you want to make this a little bit more of a less less contour shape that's totally cool that's totally up to your discretion I'm just showing you how I make patches using the offset path tool let's go ahead and do that other one just to see it one more time so I've got my my little friendly bass guy here we're gonna hold down alt we're gonna make a copy of it we're going to go to object path offset path okay 0.10 inch offset joins round miter limit for click okay we're going to go over here and we're gonna keep this highlighted and we're gonna click go to the Pathfinder tool click merge and then unite and there's our our our laser cut shape if there's still an image behind it and I'm group and just get rid of that extra image you don't need that anymore move this out of here get rid of that go up to there our color here no Phil and then remember we're gonna do our stroke at point two and then I'll highlight them both click the alignment tool horizontal alignment and vertical alignment and look at that there is a perfect patch file ready to go the laser is gonna engrave all the black parts and then it's gonna go back and it's gonna cut right around there it's that easy folks okay next you want to get yourself some leather lots of places to get leather but I will leave these in the description below what I've created is a little template for myself that allows me to quickly cut out pieces of leather from a full hide and that template is designed for my laser bed it's just a size that I like to work with and instead of getting out razor blades and other kinds of stuff I just used that little template put it right on my leather there and then what you're gonna see here is I'm going to quickly cut this leather out instead of using razor blades or scissors I'm gonna use this handy-dandy little tool and I've also linked that in the description and it is fantastic for cutting leather even thicker than this it really works great and it's a huge saver on time and my hands because man when you get into thick leather it is hard but watch this thing cut so it's electronic and it's basically electronic scissors but the way it works is amazing I mean it just blasts right through this stuff it's super easy to cut it comes with two different attachments for thicker and thinner and you can see me just following the lines there so I can cut out my nice rectangular piece of leather that I'm gonna be using for my leather patches and I'm not sitting there with old-school scissors which is definitely pain in the butt so this is the way I cut out my pieces of leather before I put them in the laser engraver all right so my tropical work area all right so now that we've cut the leather we're going to spray a nice thick coating of this 3m high-strength 90 spray adhesive get all these little knick knacks and we're spraying this goes without saying on the back of the leather not on the front I'm gonna give it a good shake this stuff doesn't really need too much of a shake and it goes on kind of like a spider web so we want to make sure we do like two solid coats okay not too fast not too slow either you don't want pooling full coverage okay now I'm going to do another angle I'll go a crosshatch definitely want to put something underneath it because whatever you overspray gets on you don't want this stuff getting overspray on anything important and that's it you're good now we're gonna bring this back inside and let it dry in our laser I'll show you about that okay so we just sprayed the adhesive on the back of our leather and now we want to get it nice and dry we don't want to be messing with it why it's a lie it's still tacky so we're gonna dry it kind of speed dry it you could just leave it out on a table in a nice dry area for a few hours maybe three hours or you could wrap it dry it by doing it this way I'm going to do I'm going to take that piece of leather we just sprayed I'm going to set it in my laser leather side down blue side up just like that I'm going to close the lid and I'm going to turn on my exhaust system whatever exhaust system you have whether you have a bow fume extractor you just got direct exhaust turn it on max and let it start drying it I usually leave this in here for about a half hour like this definitely want to let this dry before you start laser cutting it all right let's talk about laser settings I have a hundred and twenty watt Epilog m2 fusion that's what I use in my shop so these settings are what I use for cutting this thickness of veg ten leather so what I've got here is I've got 300 dpi my engrave settings are 90 speed 40 power and my cut settings which I've dialed in pretty tight is a speed of 35 power 100% frequency 50 with speed compensation checked and I have the job type as combined because we are engraving and cutting your laser settings may be completely different than this and you're gonna have to experiment when cutting and engraving leather alright so here's some patches that I've been working on a for a client and I use the same technique that you watched earlier in the video and right now the system is going through the engraving part then when it's done engraving it's gonna go back and cut that hairline that we created right out right out of there and keep in mind we already had the adhesive on the back of this leather so you do not have to apply adhesive afterwards it's already on there and it's ready to be pressed onto your hat Here I am taking out one of the patches you can see the adhesive on there cut it's nice and clean and this patch is just about ready to be applied on a hat next we're gonna talk about how to darken leather you could use stains you could use leather products to darken leather what I like to use to give my leather patch that kind of tan look is walnut oil and you can see here I'm applying the walnut oil to the patch to darken it up also keeps the leather nicely supple but I've been doing this and it gives it a nice kind of tan color you can experiment with different oils you can keep rubbing in some until you get the darkness that you want I put a little bit more on there and you notice on the back of it I've got a little piece of parchment paper parchment paper is great when working with these because we already have the adhesive on the back and well it's not super tacky you still don't want it picking up any dirt or anything so I just set it on some parchment paper you can get that I have a description is some below but this gives it a really nice kind of that classic tan color another thing that you'll want to know is that we're working with vegetal etter after you do this and it's on the Hat and having the Sun it will naturally continue to darken and get browner and brown but the raw vegetable at I'm using this doesn't necessarily come with that kind of classic tan darker color it comes almost like a pinkish color so just be aware of that and know that there's plenty of ways to darken your patch and this is the way that I use to get a darker tone you can see a side-by-side comparison here of what it did look like before I applied in oil and it's what it looks like okay so here we are at the hotronix hat press we've got our patch that we just created with their laser got our adhesive already on the back we're gonna set our temperature to 340 you want high heat when you're doing leather because it's thicker this isn't final so you don't want to treat it like vinyl you want to have high pressure and high heat so we're gonna take our hat here we're going to use this trucker hat from auto cap set this in there this isn't really a tutorial on how to use a hat press this is more a tutorial on how to create a leather patch that's ready to go for a hat press so I'm gonna get my hat aligned here get my I know my pressure set now so one of the things I like to use instead of parchment paper is this this heat resistant reusable heat mask here so I'm gonna preheat the Hat for 15 seconds make sure I cover up any part I don't want the Hat - covering I'm just preheating the Hat right now nice and warmed up my rubber garbage this is all done by site so I'm gonna take this patch look at my hat here I get it as centered as I can a cool thing about preheating your leather patch preheating your hat that already makes it kind of tacky okay I'm gonna put my heat guard back over and I'm gonna give it 15 seconds Oh I'm gonna do a total of 45 seconds in bursts so take that off that's pretty hot actually I would say 30 seconds total of heat up to 45 they give it one more boost just to make sure it's on there and these hat presses are money they are really good Ultron --ax got this is the older model they've got a new one out with like all kinds of crazy stuff and that's it man I'm just created a leather patch ready to go that's stuck on there I'm not gonna peel it off right now because it's still drying but that I've heat that adhesive that we used is great it really works nice and this hat is ready to go on there and you can this works on snapbacks trucker hats fabric if you've got a shirt press and you want to put a leather patch on with this method it's totally gonna work most important things that you need high heat and strong pressure and that will activate the glue on there and permanently bond it to any of these fabrics cotton polyester pretty much anything you know high high heat high pressure and a good laser engraver you are good to go and you see that there's no there's no peeling of the edges there's no no lifting there's there's nothing thing is good to go to last for years so hope you enjoyed this laser tutorial on how to create a leather patch with your laser that already has adhesive on it ready to go so it can be put on various kinds of apparel thank you for watching make sure you like subscribe and if you want to know where to get any of these items used in this tutorial check the description i've got links to all the products that i used and where to get them and so you can have fun doing this project and it's pretty amazing thanks [Music]

Channel: Laser Engraving 911

Views: 35,509

Keywords: how to laser engrave, laser engraving, laser engraving tutorial, fiber laser engraving, Co2 laser engraving tutorial, fiber laser how to, tips for laserengraving, laser engraving wood, glass laser engraving, how to jig for laser engraving, laser engraving art work, laser engraving business, tip and trick for engraving, fix laser engraving, make money laser engraving

Id: cMipNkmGFiE

Length: 21min 54sec (1314 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 10 2020