What Can You Do with a GLOWFORGE & 3M Adhesive?

today we're going to explore what we can do using a glowforge some 3m double-sided adhesive and a ton of different materials so i think the first project that we're going to tackle in this video is a simple sign made from this black and white acrylic so let me show you my process and then we'll go from there okay so let's start with the letters first remove one side of the paper masking and then we'll apply our 3m double-sided adhesive to the acrylic i'm using an applicator to ensure that we don't get any air bubbles or wrinkles next place the acrylic into the glow forge with the tape side down load your design into the globe forge app and hit print [Music] okay here we go [Music] we've got our letters we've got our template and we just need to make the back of the sign now peel the masking off the back of the sign we'll bring in our letters we'll bring in our template and we'll tape our template into place to help with the alignment now take a letter peel the other side of the 3m tape and press it in really good it is important to apply pressure because that is what creates the bond [Music] now remove the template and peel off the paper masking [Music] so this looks really good however i wasted a lot of tape and acrylic making this template so what i normally do instead is i will condense the letters and the shapes into the smallest space possible this way i'm using less tape and i'm using less acrylic and instead what i'll do is i'll cut my template out of something like cardstock this way all you have to do is tape your template to your backer take your letters press them in and you'll get the same result in fact a couple days ago a local dentist office had asked me to create some signs for them for their new office this one's my favorite but the cool thing though is that i created these signs using the same exact technique that i just showed you i like to take on a lot of smaller projects like these because for me it's an education it allows me to try out all these new techniques it also pays for everything in the shop and speaking of trying something new i'm going to try something that i haven't tried before and i'm borrowing this technique from trevor over at maker experiment so now when he makes a sign or a design of some sort instead of using a template he'll use the laser cutter to score lines in the acrylic and he uses those as guides when placing his shapes and all the pieces onto the acrylic so i'm going to give that a shot see how it turns out [Music] okay great i've got my letters i've got my frame and i have my scored acrylic backing now in this example i actually made the graphics a little smaller by offsetting the path in adobe illustrator this way when i place my shape onto the guide the shape covers it up so now all i need to do is peel off the paper masking and bond my shapes onto the backing [Music] that was really satisfying really enjoyed that technique thank you trevor but now i want to transition to the most exciting part of this video and that is working with different materials [Music] with the exception of the metal all these materials were cut using the glowforge if you're thinking about purchasing a glowforge i have a referral link listed in the description below that can save you some money while also helping to support this channel so i've been using my glowforge every day for about four years now and i'm in the process of building an entire glow forge for beginners course it's something that i'm very excited about but in the meantime if you have any questions about the glow forge i put my contact information below feel free to reach out i'm always happy to help now before we get into details of all these materials i want to run three tests and the first test i want to know is can this tape hold up the weight of a cinder block let's find out [Music] i can test number two can my friends peel apart this acrylic 20 bucks you can't get this acrylic part [Music] but the most important test is the fidget test this is the real world test and in this scenario you kind of just poke and prod at these things to see how well they hold up [Music] wood it's one of the most common materials to work with and here we have walnut fix to maple i'm going to give this one a 10 on the fidget score because you literally can't peel this off and the reason i like using tape when making wooden signs is that it's a whole lot cleaner than using wood glue mdf works just as well but what about cork it turns out that the tape is actually stronger than the cork itself so we'll give that one a good fidget score as well veneer is one of my favorite materials to work with let me show you the easiest way to make an inlay first use your glow forge to laser engrave your letters onto a solid piece of wood you're basically making a pocket and then affix your 3m tape to your veneer in this example i'm using this 300 lse adhesive because it's stronger than the 467 mp especially when you're trying to bond things to rougher surfaces like the pocket we just created finally fix your letters onto the pocket [Music] so we've been working so much with text but this works with graphics as well [Music] now let me show you a trick that i use quite a bit in this example i'm using some rose gold acrylic and a piece of veneer that i applied some 3m tape to a laser cut and then basically you just peel and stick now ripping off of that idea i've got some wood veneer that i applied some 3m tape to and if you stick the veneer to mdf apply some shellac and some paper masking you can laser cut it and basically make really fancy looking plywood okay next example you could also use painted wood so this is spray painted it's a gloss finish it works great this one right here is just like your craft acrylic paint moving on to acrylic we already know that this works really well using this tape that's why we used it in the signs earlier and it comes in a lot of different styles you can buy solid just like this but you can also get all different kinds of patterns as well that's pretty cool i'm also working on a uv printed acrylic line at the moment i'll have another video on that later but here are some samples and these also work really well check this out okay metal the glow forge can't cut out metal but it can cut out tape so what i did in this example is that i used the glowforge to cut out the tape and then i just affixed the two metal pieces now to speed things up i just want to say that felt foam and leather work really well you could also use rubber [Music] [Music] do [Music] up to this point we've mainly been using this tape to bond similar types of material that is wood to wood acrylic to acrylic leather to leather however we can also mix it up so here we have metal on marble cork on corian and acrylic on wood definitely a missed opportunity for a third alliteration before we wrap things up i just want to try two more tests and the next test i want to try is how well does this tape work when submerged in water so i've had this soaking now for about a week let's find out i'm gonna do this okay it's fair to say that this stuff is bulletproof or waterproof it's waterproof at least water resistant last test let's see how well this holds up to heat now according to the spec sheet this should be able to withstand temperatures of up to 400 degrees fahrenheit so i've got this heat gun i actually have no idea how hot this gets but let's see if i can heat this up and then pull it apart there we go all right well i did get these apart the acrylic started to get melty um and the tape did fall apart i'm not sure how that information is useful but maybe if you have something that's stuck that's one way to peel it apart well anyway i think that wraps up this video so i'll see in the next one good enough

Channel: John Kuiphoff

Views: 6,387

Keywords: #glowforge, #3M

Id: 99LKMkiwT0c

Length: 13min 6sec (786 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 27 2021