How to make a laser engraver locking jig template (Lightburn files in description)

I want to help you take your laser engraving skills to the next level by showing you how to create and use a templa jig this technique is going to be really helpful if you're doing production runs of the same item or find yourself engraving the same physical product frequently your laser engraver is a really precise tool but it's up to you the operator to get repeatable Engravings the main idea here is that we're going to create an absolute coordinate grid that our dial Laser sits on top of then I'll show you how to create a locking teeth jig that will act as the lock that all of the templates we make will slot into so to make this jig you really only need two tools a diode laser and a copy of light bur I'm personally using the creality Falcon 2 22 wat diode laser it's really helpful if your laser has homing or limit switches since this makes using the absolute coordinates a lot easier when I started getting into doing laser Engravings on pre-made physical products the one thing that I was struggling with was getting my framing perfectly lined up on these objects even when I managed to get an engraving that I was happy with on one object let's say a keychain for example I was getting frustrated when I wanted to make that same engraving on another keychain Not only was it frustrating but I found myself wasting a lot of time too I figured I should spend some time up front designing a way to make templates so I could save some time down the road here's a template I designed to engrave 10 wooden keychains here's a simple template I used to engrave four slate coasters and here's another template I made to engrave four round coasters before I get into showing you how The Jig works or how to make it the first thing you want 100% have to understand is how to use your Laser's absolute coordinates the other thing you'll need is a way to visualize where your Laser's absolute coordinates are I have a video that goes over how to use absolute coordinates with your laser and how to create a coordinate grid that video will be in an annotation on the screen and Linked In the video description once you're all set up with the absolute coordinate grid we're ready to start creating The Jig I'm going to supply a couple of lightburn files that you'll need in order to create the jig and the templates you can download those files from the link in the description this jig template is split into two separate light bur files one file has The Jig with the Locking teeth slots that your templates will fit into the other file has the Locking teeth positioned perfectly and you'll create the templates on top of them I recommend watching the entire how to create the jig section of this video before starting any Cuts I'm going to go over some specific parameters that will change based on your laser this Jig Is sized to fit on a 1T X 1T piece of plywood and I use 3 mm plywood these thin pieces of plywood can have a bit of warp to them so I'd recommend using one of your flattest pieces to get an accurate cut by the way I'll leave my Amazon affiliate links in the description for all the products you need to make this jig before you start cutting you need to make sure that you have your curve setting dialed in on your cut layer I'm not going to go into too much detail about how curve Works in this video but in a nutshell if you haven't configured your Laser's curve the templates won't lock in tight and they'll move around when they're in place then on the other hand if your curve settings too high it's it's going to be hard to remove the template if the jig and the template are too tight you could damage the template when you take it out and I'm speaking from experience here here's an example of two pieces that don't have any curf offset notice how sloppy the fit is here's an example of a curve offset that's too high and here's an example of a curve offset that's just right for my laser 0.06 mm in this case I'll have a video in the future going over more details on how to dial in your curve setting for your laser okay once you've got your curve setting dialed in you can go ahead and cut out the slotted teeth jig from the file provided in the description the next step's going to be the most important part of the whole process we're going to glue the jig at the origin of the absolute coordinate grid this Edge and this Edge need to line up perfectly with the left and bottom edge of the absolute coordinate grid keep in mind that the origin of my laser is at the bottom left corner just make sure you glue The Jig wherever your Laser's origin is I applied a thin layer of tight Bond original wood glue to the bottom side of the jig once you've got the jig in place go ahead and place something heavy on it to weigh it down and then give the glue plenty of time to dry so once The Jig is in place we're ready to create some templates there's three steps that we'll use to create a template first we'll design the template and attach the Locking teeth to it next we'll send that template to the laser cutter and then finally we'll create a design template which is where we're going to create and modify our engraving designs okay let's hop over to lightburn and start creating the template the main idea is that we're going to design the template on top of the Locking teeth then the template will fit into the teeth slots on The Jig that we cut earlier when you open the teeth file the first thing to note is that the exposition of the teeth group is at 35 mm it's really important that you don't move the teeth left and right otherwise the template won't fit into the slots on The Jig you also want to make sure that the spacing in between the teeth always stays the same so make sure you move the teeth as a group Next go ahead and create a rectangle angle on top of the teeth set the x position to 0 mm and the Y position to 30 mm we set the Y position to 30 mm because that's the same height as a teeth I make a lot of templates on 1T plywood or roughly 305 mm so I'll set the dimensions of the rectangle to 280 mm wide and 250 mm tall this makes the entire template 280X 280 mm which is size big enough to fit on a 1T X 1T piece supply wood with a little bit of padding for this example I'll make a template that will fit four 4in coasters I pre-measured the coaster and it's right around 100 mm so I'll create 100 mm x 100 mm Square inside the template next I'll select that square and use the array tool to create two rows and two columns I want the squares to be spaced evenly in the template so I'll set the x spacing to 26 and the Y spacing to 16 I did some math beforehand the spacing doesn't need to be perfect I just do it to make the jigs look neat next I'll select all the squares I just made group them and Center them in the template by using the aligned vertical and horizontal button I'm going to add some text to the top of the template when you start to rack up a bunch of these templates it's kind of easy to forget which one is which so I'll write a small description as well as the exact dimension of each template make sure to set this text to a fill layer and not a cut layer okay now I'm going to select all the objects in the work area make a copy of them and put them off to the side we're going to use this as our design template later next I'll go ahead and weld the template to the teeth select the teeth and the template rectangle then hit the weld shapes button before sending this template to get cut on the laser don't forget to set the curve offset value on your cut layer I can't stress enough how important this is if you haven't set up the curf on your laser yet I recommend going back into the video to the a note about curf section now turn on Cut selected Graphics select the template and everything inside it and send the template off to get cut on the laser I'd recommend saving this lightburn file at this point now that we have the template cut we can create the design template file go ahead and delete the teeth from the template that we copied over earlier we won't need those anymore then move that template to the 00 position select all the objects lock them and move them to one of the tool layers the tool layer acts as a guide that doesn't get sent to the laser engraver this file will serve as your blank design template that you can use with the template you just cut on your laser earlier go ahead and save this as a separate lightburn file that you can access later now I'll add some graphics to the template and send it off to the engraver since we're using absolute coordinates I'm just going to start the job without doing any framing hopefully you can see how to adapt this technique to create a template for whatever object you might want to engrave there is one alternative you can do if you don't want to go through all the effort of creating the slotted teeth jig you can create a simple Square corner to glue on your coordinate grid instead of the slotted jig this will let you create a simple Square template without needing to worry about the teeth the upside is that it's simpler and it saves a little bit of time the downside is that the template won't lock in place and there is a chance that the laser head can shift the template if you're engraving on a irregular-shaped object speaking from experience here for this video I'm just showing you how to create really simple templates with squares and circles but for more complicated objects what I like to do is print out one object cut design on a sheet of paper then I'll lay that object over the outline on the paper and make sure that it fits what this does is it helps save a lot of time and more importantly material a sheet of paper is a lot cheaper than a piece of plywood when you buy pre-made physical products online there can be a small size variance between individual products even from one batch I'll use this wooden keychain set I got off of Amazon I measured the dimensions of each keychain in the pack I found about a 1 MIM difference in height from the tallest and the shortest keychain it might not sound like much but it's enough to not make your keychain fit in your template what you would need to do in this case is use the largest dimension for your design templates this will make sure that each one of your products will fit in the template you'll just need to make sure that you Center the object the best you can when you place it in the template if you're trying to create a template for a tall object something you might run into is that it can move around when you place it into your template let me use this slate coaster as an example the pads on the bottom of the coaster make it to where the coaster can glide over the plywood when it's set in the template you can fix this by cutting multiple templates and gluing them together with wood glue well hey I hope you found this guide useful I'm planning on making more videos about specific templates in the future in another video I'll go over how I create specific templates for irregular shaped objects if you end up making this jig for yourself I'm curious to know what kind of objects you're engraving with the template let me know in the comments

Channel: that DIY life

Views: 7,010

Keywords: laser engraver, laser engraving, jig template, locking jig, laser engraver production runs, lightburn, lightburn how to, lightburn tutorial, creality, creality falcon2, falcon2, creality falcon2 22w, creality diode laser, creality laser, creality laser engraver, locking jig template, laser template, laser engraver templates, laser coaster template, laser keychain template, engraver coaster template, mac, lightburn mac, lightburn mac os, that DIY life

Id: 9pMRwNJvrss

Length: 10min 8sec (608 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 08 2024