How To: Epilog Laser

welcome to a spark place video tutorial on how to use our epilogue laser cutter and engravers my name is Doug and today we're going to cover the most generalize uses on these machines in this video we're going to cover and show you a full run of how to actually get something cut on this laser we will also talk a little bit about the engraving process that is possible as well this video is going to be broken up into a few parts first we're going to talk about materials then we move on to setting up the machine after that we're going to talk about getting your design ready in Adobe Illustrator and then finally a quick recap of everything we talked about while we watch a piece being cut to begin any project on these machines you must first have something to cut or engrave them this means that we need to talk about the rules we have regarding materials that we allow into the machines there are a small number of materials that are banned for being used in our laser these items are banned for the extreme health issues that they are known to cause when placed into one of these machines if we cannot guarantee that an item is laser safe please know that we will treat it as though it's not for safety reasons if you have purchased something online and you can show us where it is shown on the order or website that the item is known to be laser safe or even that it's just a safe material we'll just need to see that before letting your work progress luckily many of the materials are oftentimes labeled with safety information or what they're made of and so many of those tags will work as well all materials must be cleared with a spark play staff member before it's use failure to follow this rule or attempting to put a banned material into the laser can result in an immediate ban from our space our first banned material is any treated or finished woods raw wood is the most common material to be laser cut or engraved and that is why it's finished counterparts are at the top of our banned list raw wood means that the piece has no paints oils stains or anything else on these treatments our paints can often be extremely flammable or can cause extreme health issues with their fumes another material we add to the wood section of banned materials is bamboo unfortunately it's almost always treated before being used as a material for this reason it can be exceptionally hard to determine if it or has not been treated at all the second material banned from use is polycarbonate this material is very similar to acrylic which can be confusing and why it is so high on our list the material is clear has a rigid plastic like nature but can be very deadly if used in our laser there is almost no visual way to tell the difference in polycarbonate or acrylic and the dangers of this material are the most common reason while you may be turned away with any other clear material that is not known to be acrylic or glass the next few items on the list are final PVC carbon fiber and fiberglass each of these reliefs incredibly dangerous gases but are much easier to identify as a material the gases they release range from causing damage to the machine to incredible bodily harm or even death now that we know what can't be used in our machines let's look at some of the common materials that are wonderful choices for your project the laser can cut through a various amount of materials but they need to be no thicker than about a quarter of an inch please note that this quarter of an inch restriction only applies to cutting if you're looking to engrave your piece it must simply fit into the machine as we talked about earlier the most common material that you'll want to cut or engrave on is going to be wood we do not have any limits on what type so any raw wood is completely acceptable in the space itself we sell thin pieces of craft board that are approximately 12 inches square and roughly an eighth of an inch thick if this is not what you'll need then you'll need to provide your own safe material wood is a strong material and it's easy to make wonderful shapes or images engraved into it to make a plethora of fun gifts or strong prototypes the second most common material is acrylic please remember that we will need to see proof that your material is indeed acrylic or we'll treat it as polycarbonate and not allow it into the machine at all this material is strong and can come in various colors or opacities to create very interesting shapes and designs much like the wood we do have for sale approximately 12-inch square or smaller pieces at various prices in both blue and clear other materials such as but not limited to glass cork leather powder-coated metals laser safe rubbers and many other different materials are all possible to either be etched or cut in our machines a note that will help your project success is that any material in our laser will need to be as flat as possible being flat means that the laser will stay in focus and cut or engrave evenly cups or round objects being used with the rotary tool will also need to have a straighter side rather than a round ball like shape now that we know a little bit about materials let's go ahead and start the next step which is setting the Machine up for use these steps are simple and can go quickly however each step is important for the safety of the machine we recommend that you watch this section a couple times to get the order and steps correct first we need to start by getting power to the machine you can do this by turning on the power strip hanging on the wall then both of our red switches these red switches power the air flow systems needed to pull smell or smoke out of our machine next we move on to the left side of the machine and the large rocking switch which will power the machine on you should see the screen load up and the laser head move into its automatic home position make sure this is done with nothing in the machine to prevent the laser head from striking anything next we can go ahead and load our material here I'm using some craft board make sure you load all the way into the upper left hand corner as this location will be important when we tell the Machine where is home a little bit later with your material loaded in we need to grab the focusing tool located hanging off the left of the machine with some small magnets place the tool arrow-shaped down with its holes on the two small pegs located on bars of the laser head without this you'll be unable to etch or cut your material so please make sure the tool is sitting correctly on those pegs with the tool loaded we move to the buttons on the very front of the machine you'll notice that the buttons on this panel are each numbered and many of them labeled I'll be using the numeric system as we use the buttons on this panel press the six button to enter focus mode in this mode you can hit the up and down arrow buttons next to the 6 button hitting these buttons once will move the entire bed of the machine incrementally up or down you can also hold these buttons to move the bed a little faster to get the Machine focused you need to make sure your material is touching the end of the focus tool we recommend bringing your material up to the tool until you see it shift slightly then back off lightly this can be done as many times as you need are until you are happy press the 0 button to reset the machine this will cause the laser head to move back to its home position once you've focused the Machine make sure to remove the focusing tool and place it back on to the magnets on the side of the machine with the arrow facing death you should be able to make a sort of hook on the end after focusing we need to find what will be the home or starting point of our machine when the machine turned on it automatically calibrated itself to have a home set all the way in the upper left hand corner if your piece is square in that corner you can go ahead and use that to skip the next steps if you'd like however I will show you how to set the home yourself as well to set home we start by hitting the 8 button from there you need to hit the green gobo this displays the machines location and unlocks the motor however you won't normally need those locations from here press the 9 button to turn on the laser pointer of the Machine this dot is showing you the lasers position on your material with a finger on top of the laser head you can now push the head around to the location you need it most commonly you'll place this dot in the upper left hand corner of your piece there are settings you can adjust to make it centered or somewhere else but the default will always be top left once you're happy with your home position please hit the 7 button to set that position permanently please note that the Machine does not stay in the uppermost corner on the left for its own safety if you have made a home position further away from the corner however it should stay in place with this step we have checked our material is focused to the Machine and that the Machine knows where to start this is all we need to do on the machine currently so we can close the lid and move over to the laptop connected to it the next thing we need to prepare is your design in Adobe Illustrator Adobe Illustrator is the only program that you should be printing from to our laser unfortunately we cannot allow any files created from Microsoft Office into our machines as they do damage them now we're not going to go over much of illustrator in this video but please note that you can access it from any of our public computers within the space this means that you can start from scratch or access designs from any of the laptops we have when you're looking at illustrator you should see a window like this over here on the left you should see a create new button once clicked you should see a window like this in this window we're going to use the area over here and if you can't see these settings you can click the print tab up here the first setting we need to check is units which can be changed with this drop down menu you can use millimeters or centimeters but I'm going to leave it at inches next we need to set the artboard size we suggest you use the size of your material for these values however I know that I have a six inch square of my material to use orientation can also be set here but is normally unnecessary finally we click create now this white box is our artboard setup to our specifications let's Center it up with control zero this command shows us the entire board blown up to take up the entire viewing screen you can see that it's even on both the left and right sides now to add your design you need to come to file and place to open a file browsing window you'll need to navigate to your file which will most likely be on a flash drive located somewhere over here mine however is right here so let's double-click a common issue with designs created and formats that illustrator can understand is that we may not have the fonts used in its creation unfortunately we cannot download those fonts onto this laptop so you may need to receive your file in a more image based file type this is especially common for designs that you're looking to etch I however I'm not worried about the text on my design so let's just hit OK with placing an object your cursor should look like this but this won't preview of your design following it around remember that when you click to place the object it starts from where your cursor is located and not the preview itself I'm going to take this all the way up into the left hand corner and click now my object is a bit big and has pieces on it that I don't need let's go over how to fix that after zooming out with control - I can see that there's some text and extra space taking up most of the design if I grab the white direct select tool I can drag a small box over the part I don't want and delete it this is only possible if the object is still in pieces or parts that illustrator can understand so this doesn't apply to all designs from there I can move back to the black selection tool and with this you can see when I click on the line it selects everything at once if you look over here to the right-hand side you should see an appearance box towards the middle of that sidebar our laser only understands lines or stroke that are point zero zero one pixels as a cut line you can see once I do this it changes my design to be a very thin black line let's move our design over on to our artwork using the illustrators assistive dots to make sure that it's centered and now that's ready to be caught on our laser control zero to blow our art board back up to the full viewing window and you can see that it's barely there in these little thin black lines once we've done all of our setup we can go to file and print down in the bottom corner of this print window there is a small set up button that you'll need to click from the window there click on the Preferences button towards the middle right this blue window is the printing preferences used by epilog to adjust settings you need for the laser we're going to hold up here and talk about both edging and cutting jobs for a minute in this window you can find every setting you need to setup for your type of job first thing to know is what type you'll actually be doing rastering is for engraving only and vectors are for cut jobs resolution here is for your edging jobs and is very important however we won't be using it today here in the raster settings you can see you can adjust these on the little toggles let's look at one of these sliders on the side there are a few ways to adjust this with the mouse but I suggest you click and type your numbers into these little text boxes now don't hit enter after typing the numbers or it will close the box you can however just click preferences again to open the window back up we're gonna click on the vector job type as we know that's what we're going to be doing you can see that it Gray's out the raster settings we no longer need over in the bottom corner you have a few more options that are about personal choice or how you set the Machine autofocus is used if you'd like to try and forego using the steps of the focus tool but can increase the chances of things like cuts or etching not being perfect Center engraving is used should you need to place your whole point center of a piece so that it fits inside of a certain area our piece size is going to be the size of the artboard we set up at the beginning of Illustrator here's a little trick in case you can't remember the size of your artboard click and drag the blue preferences wind-up up a little bit and you'll see that on the print window underneath your document size is shown so let's go ahead and put our six inch size in each of these boxes here in our vector settings the toggles work the same as before setting these sliders to the settings you need is incredibly important the space does have settings available for you and I'm just going to plug those in now unfortunately the frequency slider cannot be adjusted in the same way as others you cannot type into the box and must adjust the slider manually the plus and minus buttons here are key to getting exactly the number you beat now just click OK on the blue button at the bottom this starts to work our way back towards that illustrator print window with the blue window gone go ahead and click print in the bottom of the white window as well however you're not ready yet the preview window to the left isn't correct to finish locking the settings in you need to hit the setup button again and the white print button one more time this locks the settings in and you should see the preview window adjust slightly to match your artboard and design now you can click the print button on illustrator the size or complexity of your piece will determine how long it might take to get sent to the machine if you look back over to the screen on the laser you should see a little green data light turn on and once that light is off you can see the name of the file you've loaded into the machine and you can hit the green Go button while our job runs there's a few things I'd like to let you know you must stay next to the Machine while it is running there is always a risk of fire while using this machine and if you see what we consider a continued flame please let a spark Place employee know immediately small flares are common and not to be worried about smoke is also pretty common but you should see that being pulled out via the ductwork on the back of the machine should you need multiples of the same file and made on the same material you can always just load your next piece in and hit the green Go button again please know that this only works if all the settings would stay the same from piece to piece [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] let's go ahead and pull our piece out of the machine occasionally the piece has little bits that may not fall out perfectly in most cases this is fine you might just need to put a little bit of pressure behind them to knock the piece out please remember to always pick up all small pieces or bits out of our machine so that you can leave a clean work station for the next patron let's quickly review things we learned here today we covered what is and is not allowed in our machine we also cover it how to set the Machine up for your project we talked about illustrator for a little bit and how to set your file up and we saw a complete piece cut before our very eyes using our lasers is a very fun and interesting way to create wonderful personalized gifts or even complete complex prototype pieces with precision we hope that you enjoyed this video and that it was able to help you with any questions you may have had if you ever have any an additional questions please do not hesitate to ask a spark play staff member or give us a call during our open hours thank you so much for watching this video

Channel: greenelibrary

Views: 9,633

Keywords: makerspace, library, laser engraving, laser engrave, woodworking, crafts, hobbies

Id: NzPNkGDHsjE

Length: 19min 41sec (1181 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 02 2020