How to Create Amazing Color Tiles on a Portable Laser Engraver

today we're taking a dive into lasers and i'm going to show you how to get a magic number from a tile like this and take the magic number from that tile and make something awesome like this this is a great way to make money with your cheap desktop diode lasers my name is jim and this is the edge of tech so like i said we're talking lasers today we're actually going to be using cheap white ceramic tile that you can get at any hardware store this stuff is super cheap and it makes some awesome projects then i'm going to teach you how to do this and this gives you a pattern on that tile and it's all based on your burn percentage then in the end we'll take the percentage that we like the most and will burn a tile and hopefully we get the colors we want the cool thing is you can actually do this for every color you have and when you do that for every new color you'll have a whole bunch of tiles and you'll be able to tell exactly what color you want to choose when you burn that tile on your laser the really cool thing is it's kind of like a benchy a lot of my videos are based around 3d printing and we print like a benchy or a test cube or some sort of test on our 3d printers to dial it in and look at the settings we want to use going forward so you can consider this your benchy for color tiles there's a couple things that you need to know to do before we get going number one you need to focus your laser grab a tile put it underneath your laser and get it focused in very nicely before we go any further because your laser needs to be focused in i will have videos coming up on how to do that but for this video make sure you focus your laser very well number two in the video you'll see me wearing gloves that is my choice i prefer to wear gloves when i'm around the acetone and the paint thinners and stuff like that my hands dry out and i just don't like it i'm not saying that everybody has to but safety first read the directions on the cans read the directions on your spray paint and make sure you protect yourself and i prefer gloves when i'm cleaning my tiles off number three you're going to need a program called installed and you're also going to need light burn installed i love light burn it has a ton of features it's a very advanced program for our lasers and there is a free 30-day trial and all the links will be in the description below for everything you need so make sure you get those things done before you go any further but we're going to rock and roll i think it's time we should dive in let's do a step-by-step instructional on how to make these sweet color tiles and in the end you're going to be burning awesome stuff that you can sell to your friends and your family and make money to pay for that laser let's do it so i got my gloves on and i'm going to take a microfiber i got these at costco this is actually a brand new one and some lacquer thinner and we want to we want to make sure we clean our tiles very thoroughly so they come with a waxy residue on them and a lot of the issues we see on the forums is that people did not clean their tiles off good enough so make sure you do a really good clean job make sure your tile's clean even on the corners and i always go down the edges and just make sure everything is cleaned off so you have a nice shiny clean tile something to point out you can use a lacquer thinner or an acetone to do this those are the best things in my opinion there might be other things out there that work very well to get the stuff off the tiles but these are the two that i use lacquer thinner or acetone now that the tile is clean and dry it's time to add some paint i'm going to use the rust-oleum painters touch ultra cover paint plus primer this is the 2x can this is just what i found in the hardware store so you guys can use what works for you this particular one is apple red and it is a gloss so take off the cap so make sure you shake this up very well and i have already done that then when you paint you want to spray a little out here and make sure you're you're not splotching and you want to start out here and come across nice and even i do one coat that way and then i do a quick coat this way and that's all i do and as you can see everything gets coated nicely so i do one coat this way one coat this way and then i let this dry for about 30 minutes to an hour just make sure it's dry before you put your top coat on while that's drying i'm going to do a second tile because we want to test tile so i'm going to do the same thing so quick coat across the front there and then come back across this way make sure everything is good and coated so you see the red there it's very important that you paint the same way every single time because one of these tiles is going to be used for a test as you'll see shortly but if we don't paint the same way every single time our tests really won't mean much so what you're going to do is make sure you paint the exact same way as best as you can every single time now that the red is dry we need to put our black top on so make sure you purge your paint a little bit do the same thing i just do one coat that way quick and then one quick coat that way and again as long as you do it the same way every single time you're gonna be okay now let this dry for 24 hours and then we'll go to our laser now what you want to do is go to the link in the description below and you want to get the color test 1200 final and right click and download that file then you want to open light burn light burn is not the free software it's a software that you have to pay for but it's very powerful and it works very well now that light burn is open click right here and it'll give you an open project area so you'll go to downloads and find the download that we did which is the color test if we use the scroll wheel and we zoom in a little bit you can see what i did um everything here is percentages so this is eight percent nine percent 10 11 you know all the way up to 20 then we jump to 30 and 40 these are all the percentages in which the laser is going to come on at uh in this case we're going to use 1200 millimeters a minute in the end it'll give us a test tile so we can see exactly how far down in the paint that each one of these percentages burn on the right side you can see all of different layers and they correlate with all the colors here so if you wanted to change this and you wanted to do a different percentage or maybe do a different speed you could actually go through and open it by double clicking it and then you could go right here here's your speed so you could set this at 1300 or 900 whatever you need to do and then along the left side here you can actually just go through each layer and you want to change each one to match if you change the speed to 1300 and you want the whole tile to be 1300 just make sure you change them all in this case we're going to keep it at 1200 because i've had really good success with 1200 millimeters a minute they are set to fill and then do a line which is awesome it's actually going to go in order of each of these layers so each one of these is a layer once you have it set here in light burn we are going to get it ready on our laser and we're going to get this burning now what we have is the file open in light burn we have our tile that's been painted and sitting for 24 hours what we need to do now is position our tile on the bed and we need to get this test burning so what we're going to do is hit this little button right here and this sets the laser position by clicking on the page then i'm going to click on the little green dot once i click on the little green dot that'll send the laser to that point in the bed and it doesn't matter where your laser is it's probably already homed but it'll send it to anywhere on the bed that you click when you have this little button selected so you could go over here you could go over here it's all going to be okay but what we want to do is click the green dot right there so now what we need to do is show the laser on our surface and uh move our tile to where it needs to be i go to the move tab and there should be a little fire button right here well it's not there right now so if you don't have that button what you need to do is go to edit go to uh device settings and you need to enable the laser fire button right here see how it's green you need to make sure that is green if that is not green it looks like one of these go ahead and click it so it is green just like that the other issue i have is for some reason the resolution on my screen is not allowing me to see everything so what i do is i have to move it kind of out of full screen mode to see the rest of the buttons and i'm not sure why i have to do that i will research that but as we go forward i'm going to put it like this so you guys can see so as you can see now we have this fire button right here and you're going to use this when you focus as well but we're not going to do that in this video so what you want to do is hit that fire button and it'll actually show the dot where it is on the build surface as you can see it's right above my finger here so what we need to do is take and move our tile up so it's just in the corner just like that now my dot is right up in this corner and it's only at one percent so we're going to hit that fire button again to turn off the dot what we need to do next is see where this is actually going to burn on the tile so there's a frame button right here i'm going to hold shift and hit that button and what that is going to do is turn your laser on and it's actually going to show you exactly where it's going to be on that tile hit shift hit that frame button and watch and from here you can kind of center your tile i know it has to come down a little bit and you can kind of center it to where exactly you want it on your tile i'm going to actually bring it down like right there we're going to try again and so we could say that's pretty good make sure you have your safety glasses on and hit start and what that will do will start the burn now that our test is done you can see exactly what it did it started with the eight percent it went up to 20 percent and a jump to 30 and 40 here in order to get the most accurate colors what we need to do is do this very gently but we need to wipe it with a microfiber so i'm just going to come through here give it a nice wipe and and maybe go both ways but do it very gently and you want to do that on all your prints when you're done especially if you're going to clear coat them the reason is if you if you're going to clear coat them and you don't wipe them the paint will actually react with a clear coat and we don't want that to happen so now you can see all the colors and these are really dark still now if you really wanted a dark red maybe one that just is barely getting into the reds it's really dark you could go for here if you wanted something a lot lighter you could be up in this area if you wanted to start getting lighter red and maybe some pinks you could go here and the cool thing about this is you can do this with every single color you use and do one tile like this and this is now your color swatch just like when you're going to paint your house if you see a whole bunch of colors you can hold them up to your wall and determine what color you want this will actually work on all the tiles for all the colors and you can determine what color you want to burn with with what percent is the max so here's an example of what i'm talking about we have a red an orange a green and this tile is actually just black over the white tile so you can do this test on any color tile you want and that that'll give you a color swatch for every single one which is really cool because now i can see maybe i want grays um in in this black tile maybe i just want some grays or dark grays or in this green one maybe i want a lighter green or a darker green so this will actually give you a really cool way to look at all the different burn options for your tiles when you're doing color tile now what we want to do is find an image to burn in this case i think i'll do a shine down logo click on images and you can see there's this one right here that's a pretty sweet image so i'm going to actually right click it let's do uh save image as we're going to do shine down logo so save your picture whatever it is then you want to open a program called and what is is a image manipulation tool and we're going to use to basically turn this into a pretty sweet file for burning our tiles so i go to open and i find the picture i just saved and i open it and that's this shine down logo right here so what i need to do now is save this in the correct size for my tile so i'm going to click on image i'm going to go down here to scale image we're gonna go to inches because my tile is four by four inches so we're going to do four by four now i want to do 600 resolution so when i do that it's actually going to change my image size so go back up here hit four again hit four again and um once you have four by four and then 600 resolution is what i use i'm going to hit the scale button and it is going to blow itself up huge so i hold ctrl and i scroll back on the wheel on my mouse and you can see now we have a 4x4 shine down logo and that is pretty much ready what i need to do now is get this ready to process and to do that i'm actually going to use the big gimpin plugin you can find this in the link below in the description this is what garrett over at 3d print farm uses i really like this plug-in it's just it's super easy to use when you're first getting into this and it helps you create some awesome tiles so i'm going to go ahead and open the big gimpin plug-in it is tile it is 600 dpi like we said and i'm going to do i'm going to leave it at 100 by 100 because actually my tiles are just a hair bigger than four by four and this is going to be fine so i'm going to hit okay it's going to scale it's going to invert it's going to do a whole bunch of magic in the background when we're done we actually get a file that looks like this and this right here is what we're actually going to use to burn anything in the black is going to be pretty much using the max percentage of our power on the laser anything in the outline back here is actually going to be using less percentage and it's going to like shade it in and if we actually scroll in what this does is it takes this and turns it into newspaper print so a whole bunch of dots everywhere and it gradually goes darker and lighter and that's how we're actually going to get our burn so if we back out we get our picture here all we're going to do is go over we're going to do file i'm going to do export as you want to go to where you want to export it as i'll just do it to my desktop here we want to do select file type jpeg because we want to make sure this is saved as a jpeg i'm going to type shine down logo and i'm going to save it right to my desktop now it's going to pop a little box up that asks us for quality i'm going to go to 100 percent because i want to use full quality and then i'm going to hit export right here it doesn't take long and it is gone now you want to go back into light burn and my burn is done on the test file so what i'm going to do is go up to the left corner and i'm going to hit new which is this button up here and that's going to clear the slate then i'm going to go here where the little arrow is i'm going to go import then we're going to go to the desktop and i'm going to find shine down logo.jpg and that's going to bring up the shine down logo that we just did in the big gimpin plug-in in you can move it anywhere you want and if i zoom in you can see it's ready to be burned anything in black is going to use just about or full power on the laser anything else is actually going to feather out and use a little bit less power to give us that blending this is going to be really cool because how this is going to work when we burn our tile is we're going to select the color that we want this middle to be and then the outsides will actually be a different shade in our case i'm going to use the black and red tile that we painted so in the center it's actually going to look a lot lighter in the s and the shine down here hopefully the bird will be a perfect shade of red and blends of red and it'll look really cool when we're done so this is where we need to go look at our test tile that just finished and determine what percentage we want to use on this burn in my case i want the s to be pretty white and i want the rest of it to kind of fade in we can use 30 here which looks like it got all the way through to the white 40 actually looks like it over burned the tile you want to be careful you don't want to over burn your tile that's not good you could do a little bit lighter and just do two colors in the red but i think i'm going to try 30 for this tile and see how it turns out i'm really hoping it'll do 30 and maybe one of these other colors out here for the rest for the shading around it so now that we looked at the tile we can check out our image here if we go to our cuts tab we can see that it's an image in this case we did the tiles already at 1200 millimeters a minute and in they want the max power here at 15. well when we looked at our tile i really wanted that dark area the the shine down and the s burned into almost white like all the way through the paint and i wanted this outside area hopefully to be more of a red anything that's not in there will just be black and you can see that by there's no color around it so in our case because i want this to be white and burned all the way through the tile i'm going to use 30 percent because that's what we chose on our tile now if you just wanted it to be red in here and maybe you wanted these to be like a darker charred red or something you could easily dial this all the way back and and probably use a 15 or something or whatever percent works for you use the percentage that you like i'm going to use 30. i'm going to come down here and i'm going to enable pass-through because we already did everything in the big gimpin plug-in i want to enable pass-through because it's just going to do dot for dot here a little recap we have 1200 speed millimeters a minute in my case because we're using a diode laser uh we're gonna do max power at 30 and then i'm going to hit enter to save all that to make sure you save it you can see it up here it's an image 1200 at 30. now all we have to do is use the method we did before align our tile and make sure it's square and lined up hit start and let this thing fly and we're going to do that now the laser we're going to be using in today's video is called an ortur laser master ii this is the 20 watt version which means the input of the laser is 20 watts the output of the laser is more like four and a half to five and a half depending on what power it's running you can find this in the description below but this is the laser we're going to be using for this video and for some of the videos going forward now what we need to do is position our tile so we're just going to hit that fire button like we did before and we're only using one percent power and it's going to show us the dot up in the corner so mine's right there let's hold that shift key hit the frame button like we did before and let's see how close we came i would say that is dang close i'm going to leave it right there now our magic number was 30 because we really want that inside to be white assuming our magic number is 30 and our speed is 1200 like we talked about before everything is good to go and i'm gonna hit start that'll go down and start the burn now so you can see now we're getting there we're maybe a third done and you can see where it really burned down where the shine down is there but you can still see some red in there too and that's kind of what i'm going for we're about a little more than halfway done and as predicted we are definitely burning further down in the shine down here in the s that's exactly what we wanted using that magic number of 30 i really think this is going to turn out awesome as you can see it's burning deeper where it was completely black on that picture where the shine down here and the s is and then around it where it was shading it's using a lighter power and it's really pulling out the red in that tile i'm excited to see what this looks like in the end i think it's going to be pretty cool something else i wanted to show you is the importance of a good pair of safety glasses so that is straight on at the laser right now if you have a good pair of safety glasses that's what this looks like here and you can really see how it blocks that blue light this actually helps you see the laser beam much better when you have a pair of these glasses and you can focus everything much better than the glasses that come with these chinese kits but this right here is a good way to show you what a good pair of safety glasses will look like when you look through there if i take this away you're gonna see all that blue light again like this okay we're done this is what it looks like when it's fresh done now what we're going to do is take our fresh and clean microfiber right here and i'm going to hold the tile and just give this thing a good wipe i'm going to go once that way i'm going to hold it and go this way so now that the tile is wiped off with a microfiber i did not press hard it's just a light pressure wiping it i usually wipe it this way once and then this way once just to get everything out of there you can see the desired effect uh really happened here so we burned down to 30 down into the s and the shine down part here and then the rest actually gave us a really cool red right around the outside the next thing we need to do is clear coat this so let's go do that now i always want to paint in a well ventilated area in my case it's outside i'm using the same type of paint except for this version is clear again it's the rust-oleum painters touch and this is just a gloss on this one the first thing to do is always make sure that your tile has been wiped off with that microfiber first and make sure it's wiped off really good if you don't do that the clear coat will actually eat the debris that is on the tile and i didn't know that then you end up with something like this where it actually ate all of the black here as you can see it looks cool in the end but i did not mean to do that we are going to clear a little bit different we want to start with with your clear and a very light coat for the first one so i'm just going to go through and give it a very light coat just like that and i'm going to let that dry since the sun is going down i'm going to let this dry for about a half hour before my next coat the next coat can be a little thicker but this one needs to be very light just in case you don't get everything off then it won't react so bad but make sure you do a light coat just like i did i just went once up the top make sure it's even if you can and we'll come back shortly so it's been about a half an hour and i've let this dry for about a half an hour now and you can touch it and it's just barely tacky so it's not wet anymore it would leave a fingerprint if i push down into it but because the sun went down it's not quite drying as fast as it usually does if i'm out here in the sun i'm going to do another coat this one's going to be a little bit thicker but i'm actually going to come sideways so that first one we went up i'm going to come sideways on this one and you can actually already see how those colors are starting to pop now with that clear coat especially with the gloss so here we go so that one was a little bit thicker i went this way that time i'm going to do about two more coats i'm going to go up for my next one and maybe come across again for the fourth one and that'll be it on this tile but make sure you do three to four coats depending on how thick you want it if you're going to use this for a coaster you want to go a little bit thicker because you want to make sure it doesn't scratch so much when you're setting your drinks on it i do four to six coats if it's a coaster in this case for this video i'm gonna do four so i'm gonna do two more and we'll be back so i'm back inside and that's it we're done i've taken you start to finish on how to make this tile right here now something i did wrong on this tile and you'll see in the close-up here in a second is that i did not follow my own directions and let the very first coat of clear coat the real thin one dry all the way before i put the second coat on it caused a little bit of cracking right in the top as you can see that's totally my fault but i tell you what with a little bit of patience a little bit of practice you won't see that at all as you can see in these pictures right here those are all great and they don't have any of that cracking the test pattern we did only took about 17 minutes to do and i tell you what that's a lot quicker than a benchy on a 3d printer so you could do this in 17 minutes for each new color tile you could do one of these and have one for every color all you have to do look at the burn percentage you want punch it in and hit that start button if you have any questions about this technique throw them in the comments below do you already burn tiles do you have any advice for me toss those in the comments below too i'd love to hear about it i love hearing new ideas and i'm going to be doing a lot more videos on this laser we're going to do some setup videos we're going to do some grid videos so stay tuned for videos for the laser coming up it's endless on what you can do you can do any colors you can do any picture you can do pictures you've taken yourself which is so awesome i've done a couple of those myself and your friends and your family are gonna love it so once you get this rolling throw a bunch of them on facebook throw a bunch of them on your social media and i tell you what the orders are gonna start coming and this is a great way to make some money on the side using your cheap desktop laser just remember always use your magic number on your tile benchy and you'll be burning like a pro another cool thing you can do with these is you can actually go on amazon and you can get cork and this specific cork has adhesive on the back and these are four by four inch pieces that fit right onto the back of the four by four tiles that we're doing now they stick on there you can press them on and now you can use these as coasters they won't scratch your tables they'll sit on that cork there this is another great way to add value while you're making money using tiles like this and all you're doing is adding a really cheap piece of cork with adhesive on the back straight to the back of the tile to make it a little more fancy i hope you learned something today and as always keep burning what's up everybody i hope you loved the video if you did give me that thumbs up hit the subscribe button right here or the little bell right over here if you want to get notified anytime hop makes goes live on monday or we put another video out could it be a laser or 3d printing i hope you guys liked the video and i hope you like my dive into lasers did you see this one

Channel: The Edge of Tech

Views: 174,744

Keywords: ortur, ortur laser master 2, ortur laser master 20w, ortur laser engraver, ortur laser master, make money with lasers, desktop lasers, da big gimping plug-in, How to Create Amazing Color Tiles on a Portable Laser Engraver, portable laser engraver, color tiles, laser engraver, laser engraving, laser cutter, laser grbl, lightburn, engraving, gimp tutorial, gimp photo editing, gimp photo manipulation, engraver, lasergrbl, gearbest, neje, home decor, grbl, neje laser engraver, diodelaser

Id: yJeJxlRbWY8

Length: 27min 0sec (1620 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 02 2020