xTool screen printer for lasers!

hello everyone welcome back to the workshop and today we're going to play around with something a little new to me but still along with lasers and that is screen printing using the xtool screen printer they have come up with the process for using steel screens that use a standard Emulsion but the laser to burn the image into the screen we're going to take a look at their setup how we do that so if you're interested in this or just want to find out more stay tuned we're going to jump right into it I am a no means an expert on screen printing but I've done it a couple of times and it is a fun process to make some Unique Products the basic gist of it is you have the screen material and normally it's going to be into a frame that's holding it nice and tight and it's a very fine screen but it's covered with this Emulsion that generally will block the screen out and the normal process is that you would set up your artwork on here and you would uh then cover it in the Emulsion you would expose the Emulsion to like UV light that would cure it and then you would peel back your areas that you wanted to not be exposed and therefore you would have your image that you're going to allow the ink to pass through now in this case X tool is using more of a steel based screen that can hold up to the laser and you cover the entire Emulsion and then you laser away the Emulsion where you don't want it and it creates your logo and uh or your image and so you can kind of see that here on this one this is something I did on a live stream that we previewed the just engraving my logo with this and I will link down below if you want to check that out as well but figured I'd do a more full process on the xtool screen printer sending up in the laser and such uh here with this video so we're going to take a look at the various parts we'll get a fresh screen set up into one of their frames we'll set the uh uh some artwork up in ex creative space and then we'll get it into the press or the uh The Jig to get it uh screen printed and we'll see how it does so let's get over closer to the workbench we'll jump into it all right so let's start by talking about the frame which is going to hold your screen in place uh with the basic kit we get one of these frames and the idea is you can put your screen in here and then on these channels they have these kind of metal uh rods with kind of a flap what they will do is they will sit into this channel they'll push in the screen fold down and then these cams will tighten everything up so uh that makes them easily removable uh and reusable to a point once you remove them out of the frame you're going to lose any positioning that you may have had so if you're doing single color that's not a problem if you're doing multicolor you're going to want to try to keep them in the frames because uh that's going to then key off of where you laser them and then put them into the jig when you go to press and put the on them but that's a whole another topic we're going to focus on single color so in this one we can pull the screens out we could put it back in retighten it up and you can do that a number of times as long as you keep the screen clean the ink will dry up and it'll kind of clog up that screen over time so um you can run a few prints and then you want to clean it off with water um and then you can take it out of here put another screen in if you want and you can reuse that a number of times before you're going to need to probably clean off the whole screen and apply new ulion start over so um they are somewhat reusable but they do also offer um you can buy extras as well so I think those are going to be listed on their site at a four pack for about $25 for the screens alone and then these frames I believe are $60 but let's jump in let's get a fresh screen installed in here uh and I'll show you kind of how it all fits together and tightens up right so we're starting with the frame here and the thing that you want to make sure is that your cams are all in the open uh position because as they close like this they're actually pulling this bar down and that's what's going to tighten up the screen so just want to make sure they're all fold out so that they have the least amount of tension on there and then we want to put the cardboard down into the frame and uh you want to have this kind of lay somewhat flat on here now some of these have these tabs uh and I think maybe they've removed those on future ones but you just want to fold out of the way if they are in there but you you want to get the cardboard to basically just sit in the frame like that so this should be fairly flat up on top next we're going to take our bars like this and when you fold them in these flaps are going to go towards the outside so we're going to start up top here keeping our screen centered you just kind of push that in and then curl that under fold that flat like that same thing with the one on the end here we're going to just kind of push this down in fold that flap and then go ahead with these side ones as well just kind of you don't worry about getting it too tight on the front end but you want it to be fairly snug it'll tighten up with those cams just kind of roll that round bar into its slot then once they're all in like that you can start pulling your cams shut they will tighten up and that will pull the screen nice and tight and then there's just the ones on the end here this tightens it top to bottom so now you see that that's fairly tight we're going to flip this over we're going to pull this cardboard out and then you'll notice tight as drum and nice and smooth so you want to keep this clean you want to keep dust off of it on both sides so just kind of check to make sure that none of the leftover sometimes the cardboard there's a little bit of adhesive that sticks you want very clean and uh nice and tight but that's it to getting the screen set up into the frame next step is that we can get it aligned into the laser and then start working with it in Creative space right so now if you picked up the multicolor kit the advanced kit uh it may come with this fixing bar and what this does is sit into your xtool D1 your feet on your laser are going to sit into these kind of round slots and that'll lock it in place up against this bar and then it has these little pegs here that will allow the frame to align into those pegs so that if you're doing multiple frames that you want to have different colors and layers to your printing um this will allow you to line up each one of those frames so I'm going to get this set up with my D1 Pro 20 wat in my custom enclosure it will fit in here and uh then we'll be able to use this even though we're just going to do a single color but let's get this into the laser we'll get the frame in there as well then we're going to jump into setting apart artwork there now it's fixed the feed are in front and back and and this can't move separate from the laser so now we have these notches in the frame we can just rotate this around we can set these into there and that will mean that this is I mean you can slide it this way but top to bottom and if you push it up all the way against there then it's not going to be able to move and you'll be able to engrave everything on your screen so while we're here we can go ahead and set our Focus we're going to flip our foot down we're going to bring this down just so it touches and you don't want it to necessarily push into the screen so just bring it down so it just touches also make sure your Sub Focus is set up and uh now we're good to go with Focus let's jump into creative space all right so we're over here at the computer and we are going to play around with a simple design now X tool did include this tote bag with the sample so we're going to be playing with this and I went ahead and went to a local craft store was even able to pick up a spare one just in case so these are just kind of your woven fabric bags and uh great for you know grocery shopping or wherever you're hauling your stuff around so we're going to play around with that now I'm going to be doing this on the xtool D1 Pro as we saw setting up with that bar you can use any laser with these as well as uh you could use light bur as well I'm going to be working with xtool creative space just to kind of use their products and use some of their presets however they do have some recommended settings for engraving on these screens I'll try to link to that information if I can find it otherwise I'll try to maybe put it on the screen or something but uh point is you don't need to use an X tool laser with this you don't need to use creative space you can use your own laser in uh lightburn or laser GPL just using those settings however we're going to use the xtool stuff because they have it all integrated makes it so much easier so let's jump into into the software and take a look at what we're going to do all right so we're here in xtool Creative space I do have it connected to the D1 Pro and one of the nice things that you can do is actually use their predefined material so we're going to come over here to the user defined material and if you see in here we actually have coded screen 100 mesh now if you're not seeing it you can come into this uh more materials and you can go through and find additional ones that might not be listed in your Creed space so we have the code is screen 100 mesh we already have that so we're going to go ahead and hit use and that will set up our whole material for uh our our speeds and feeds for that all right so going to go with a simple custom design my wife made um again on these bags we're going to be just adding something so go ahead and import an image here she created this in illustrator and whatnot and it just says or my trinkets a little kind of a starburst kind of thing now uh anytime you're working with anything that's import uh you might have some things to fix so let me just show you really quick now if we select all this and we go to the engrave it's going to look a little funny because we have these extra areas in here and the reason that is I think is because we have most likely double lines there so I'm just going to switch this back to score and we are going to quickly zoom in on these so I'm select outside there I'm G to click on just that one and delete it there we go yep it was a second layer so again going to do the same thing here going to delete that extra line and the rest of them look okay now the other thing I want to do is instead of having these be individual objects I want to combine them so I'm going to select them all we're going to come up to the combine and actually for this one we want to subtract at overlap click on that and now you see all those extra lines go away we have just one object selected here now we can work with this as a single item so what we want to do is kind of figure out how big want to make this and uh we'll see there um looking at my bag here I want to kind of Center it in the middle so I'm going to take measurement here and we're going to go maybe about 6 in square give or take well 6 inches wide it's a little OB long so um the conversion on that is going to be about 150 mm wide so going to make sure this is locked orientation we're going to take our width and going to just take this down to 150 and that keeps the orientation the same now the way we are engraving this we're actually engraving on the reverse side so we're going to need to also rotate this so I'm going to grab this I'm going to rotate it this way uh and now that's going to put the top of the engraving towards the back side of the uh the frame which means that when you look at it's going to be correct but then we also do need to reflect this and we're going to now reflect this vertically so that is going to reverse it that way so that will now since we're engraving on the back it's going to engrave it reverse but when we place our screen down on our material we're actually going be running the ink from the opposite side that we're engraving it on so then it'll be right side up and I'm orienting it to with the top to uh my left because that will allow us to Slide the bag in top to bottom we can get it lined up and then we'll just pull the ink down over the top depending on where you're putting your uh your engraving into your item and onto your screen uh will depend on which rotation you want it so just kind of keep in mind that you're engraving on the back side and then what area you want it let's get this lined up and we'll get it framed in the laser uh and ready to burn we're back here at the laser like I say I have these pins pushed in all the way so this Frame is kind of locked in there for this it wouldn't really matter so much uh as we're only doing a single color but it's good practice to use it that way uh and so um the due to the size of this I'm going to kind of Center it more um it it's just going to need to take up that space maybe we'll be able to do something smaller but we're going to go ahead and let the laser frame out and kind of see the area it's going to go that all looks pretty good so we can jump back into creative space make sure our settings are right and then we'll send this off to burn all right so we completed our framing uh everything looks good there and now we did make sure we've changed this to engrave and what they have set up is power of 70 speed of 178 millime a second and then 160 lines per centimeter so that is what xtool recommends for the D1 Pro 20 watt if you're using one of their other lasers they'll have that plugged in there otherwise if you're using your own laser those are going to be some that you can kind of estimate off of you're going to need to do the conversion if you're using millimeters per minute remember to multiply that by 60 lines per inch versus lines per centimeter again you're going to need to do those conversions but um we've got this all set up we've got it set to engrave we have our power and whatnot ready to go so now we can just go ahead and send this off the laser and we'll let it burn this [Music] image [Music] all right our screen has finished engraving so we can go ahead and pull this out however uh you do want to just check your screen before you move it and ensure that it has gotten through the material uh if it's a little bit thicker ver Mion it may still look a little white what you're looking for is a very clear uh engraving through the screen so you can kind of see through it so uh mine does look good so we're going to go ahead and pull this out and so here as you can see it on the back this is what I'm talking about it's nice and clear and if we flip this around you should be able to read it okay uh for my Trinkets and uh like I said you can see through this screen there's not anything blocking that so if yours looks a little white like maybe some of the Emulsion didn't quite get burned off go ahead and burn it again otherwise you're going to have problems using getting the ink through to your material so with this all done now what we can do is start getting it set up in the actual screen printing press here so let's take a look at a few of those features on there and uh then we will get to the actual application of ink all right so this is the basic screen printing setup here what we have is a work surface and so they do provide this wooden work surface it has some spots here that lock into these pegs and these pegs are here because up front we have some knobs I'll see if I can bring this down just a little bit so you can see we got some knobs that will adjust each individual pin so you can do that to help align your work so these need to sit down into those pegs and once they do your whole machine will kind of be locked in place and now uh you will be able to see on the front here they have the little directions that it'll adjust the front side to side the back side to side and then the whole thing front to back just to help you align your project to the screen when you put it in here now the screen frame is going to get captured into this bar up front and then again there's some cam locks up here that do then kind of lock it in place that's to help everything kind of stay stationary and then to count for various different depths of items they also have this knob on the side so you can release that this slides up they give you about I think 4 in of working space on here that uh you can have some larger items and print on top of them so what you will want to do is bring this down to your desired height lock it in and then your when your frame is in here then it'll lay flat on your object now the board default is a wooden board it does have a grid on there and then they provide provide this kind of sticky mat so as you can see here as I peel this up we do have a board with a grid on here and then they provide this extra mat here so the idea with this mat is that your items will kind of grab onto that and be held in place now they do come with kind of these clear plastic sheets on each side so uh I keep mine on there when I'm not using the Press just to keep little bits from getting on here and and getting dust on there um it's I would recommend doing that just kind of keeps the thing a little bit more clean and uh then you'll be able to use it much longer so uh that's the basic gist of it we can then um bring our our frame and our screen over in here we'll get this locked in then we'll start getting the uh item squared up and position on here for the ink application all right so before I go and applying this down here I want to try to get my graphic kind of centered where I want it and I can tell that it's a little bit off from this Center Line so I'm going to try to bring this over so like I say you can adjust the front and then you can adjust the rear you can just kind of slide it over to where I'm looking at through my screen I know it's hard to see but I'm trying to bring that Center Line over as best I can so it lines up up kind of in the middle of our engraving and it's pretty close also want to try to make sure that it is square to everything so now I know that if I get my bag centered on here uh that I'll be able to get it lined up now you also want to kind of take reference of where your item is so we can get it up far enough now this is open underneath here what this will do is allow us to actually bring our material hopefully around it and uh in this case that bag is too narrow for that so let's go ahead with this other one see if this one will fit on here does look like it's a little bit wider so we're going to go ahead and check that fit yes it will but we need to also make sure that it'll go up high enough for our engraving and it's not quite so I'm going to go ahead and play with it this way instead now you're going to want to get these handles out of the way you want it to be about as flat as we can so once we're pretty sure of where it's going to sit I'm going to kind of keep everything out of the way ensure that it's going to go down fairly flat cuz we're going to be pushing this through and then the ink is going to push through onto that so once we're feeling like it's going to fit okay go ahead and pull our plastic off let's get this repositioned so here we we've got our kind of our sticky material helping to hold this in place so we're going to try to line that up it's again looking at where our Top Line is I'm just going to move this up a little bit further now ideally we'd have this top surface held down as well but we want to try to make sure we get any of the wrinkles out which will help give us a better application of the ink and uh not have this bunched up too much but out of the way might even be able to get that tucked under there some there we go I think that'll work it's it comes up a little bit High because this is bunched up and not laying flat but we'll hopefully be able to work with this this is definitely a learning curve as to uh the process and also what materials work well so you'll be able to hold this down you're going to squeegee this on now the application is you're going to put some ink along the top and you're going to take your squeegee here you're going to hold your material down your frame down and will squeegee along the screen like so pushing that ink onto the material so that's where you really want this to lay as flat as possible um and not be uh be binding on anything so I'm actually going to think release this just a little bit bring this up a little bit more so this lays a little more flat take your time get that set up okay and then uh we'll give it a shot right so like I said I got the basic kit and it came with just four inks and that was black blue yellow and red so we're going to go ahead with the red um It's actually kind of maybe a little more of a magenta than red but we'll see how it dries this does air dry uh uh so you can just print it on and then let it sit you can apply a little bit of heat to try to accelerate it but the important thing is is that once we put the ink on there we want to squeege it out get our print on here and then either move on to our next application or we're going to want to clean that off because like I said this is going to start air drying so I'm going to get this opened up and uh they do provide you with this nice little metal spatula that we can dip into the ink well um put them on there and it's important to use enough ink to cover your entire surface uh because if you get too light with it it will fade out as you go across your engraving so let me get this all set up and we'll uh go through that process and see how it turns out all right so this squeegee does have a little magnet back here so it'll stick to the frame here if you want um it'll stick to the back um just make sure it's handy and like I said we want to take some of this ink and we're going to apply it it along the the side cuz we're going to pull this towards us and again you want to use enough ink that it's going to cover uh your entire your entire uh engraving your entire image and such so and you can probably reclaim some of this if you have extra at the end so put a good dollop on there so that you don't run thin so and then the middle here where we have some letters I'll add a little bit extra that could possibly be too much but like I say we're we're kind of learning here uh just be careful not to get that all over everything so again we want to push down make sure this is firm we're going to take our squeegee and we're going to grab our ink and I'm going to go on this side and we just want to push this down and into our object so it's going to push it through our mesh if you feel the need to you can do it a second time there we go and then now we can take the rest and reclaim it back into our ink well and hopefully if we did that right we'll be a open this up and it should be on our bag and there you go it's nice coverage on here um I don't want to move this too much while it's initially drying since it's single color will be okay and we'll get a closeup of this but that looks really good we've got really good coverage and uh like I said we going to let this air dry you can use like a blow dryer or heat to try to help cure it a little bit quicker but in the meantime we want to wash off our screen so that we can use it again all right I don't have I don't have running water out here so I just have a bucket of clean C water good old ice cream pail and I'm just going to kind of run over especially the areas where the the screen has been engraved from and just try to pick up as much of that you can kind of see there it picked that up and run over this other side trying to clean off that ink from I'm focusing primarily on the screened area that's cleaned out if you get a little bit sticks to the Emulsion where it's not engraved that's not the end of the world obviously you don't want any real heavy heavy gops on there because that will help interfere with your future transfers but just kind of wipe this down as best we can soaking up as much of that ink there we go looks pretty good now again I'm going to clean up our squeegee we don't want that to get caked down there too much going to keep that nice and clean so it runs smoothly over everything and I'll show you our screen is clean ready for another run of a different color if we wanted to do that all right so on my live stream we did take this original one and played around with my logo on a couple of these so what I want to do is actually run uh the I'm going to put this back in the frame and I picked up some of these neoprene can coozies and I want to see how well we can screenprint on these with the small logo uh cuz I'm curious to see how well that might work we all do customization of items and a lot of times May might be small runs of things and so I want to see if this is maybe viable for an option there so I haven't done this on neoprene it's you know kind of rubbery we'll see how well it sticks to this but uh let me pop this back in the frame and uh we'll give it a shot on a few of these so we're going to want to kind of line up where these are going to end up so have to kind of eyeball it trying get it somewhat centered and straight you can just kind of see it's hard it's probably not going to show up on video but you can just kind of see I actually want to move this up a little bit you can kind of see the outline of the Koozie through the screen here just trying to make sure it's somewhat centered I'm looking at the base here also the top trying to eyeball it so once we get it kind of set up we can maybe put some masking tape or something on here to help us quickly align them all right so I think I'm going to go with that so what I'm going to do is grab some masking tape and just kind of make a simple temporary jig down there this let's get our black ink out careful not to get this on your fingers too much otherwise you're going to be cleaning ink out of there for a while once again put a healthy amount just at the top of your design like that take our squeegee push down on our material give a nice swipe like that let's take a quick look at this and that's not too bad I might actually move it over just a little bit more for the next one but set that down there grab another one out of our box place it down using our temporary alignment tape add a little more ink fact we can probably could have used this there we go push it down and squeegee that in there's number two it's very cool all right so we completed a couple projects the bag as you can see here uh for all my trinkets um worked out pretty well it looks like it's centered fairly well and it's got some nice coverage let me see if I can get this closer for you nice solid coverage on there and uh once it fully cures you want to let this dry for a good 24 to 48 hours before really using it and really getting it wet but but we'll see how that holds up I am very pleased with how the Koozies can Koozies can coolers whatever you're calling them came out now the Curious Thing will be is as these get used and possibly stretched how that holds up but the initial look um the coverage is good it's got a nice imprint of the logo and uh you know I I'd be able to do it in multiple colors and actually once these are dry be able to flip them over and do something else on the back side and you these weren't terribly expensive um I think I got a pack of 25 of them on Amazon for right around $15 so even just starting out you know you can get these in at maybe about7 cents a piece and if you really got into it I'm sure you could get the uh price down even further so uh just a maybe a fun thing to be able to add some customized items to your crafting your hobby if you're doing a small business shop or whatnot um without having to get in too big to screen printing to be able to do these things so hopefully this gives you some insight as to what you can do with it uh I'm not done with this next thing I do want to try is to come up with a t-shirt design and do maybe a full t-shirt on the front uh or back of a T-shirt and see how that goes so if you've got any ideas of what would go well on there let me know in the comments also let me know what else you might be curious this could do I've played around with paper wood other products as well so screen printing isn't just for Fabrics definitely something you can do on a lot of items but uh more playing around to come for sure so this is a new product for xtool they just finished up a Kickstarter campaign with it and we'll be shipping those items out to people shortly they are doing a pre-order I believe their next shipping of these is hopefully going to come out in mid to late January or so so if you're interested in that I'll have links down below where you can check it out maybe check out some of their pre-order pricing on this if it's something that you want to add to your shop your workplace um check it out and uh those links will be affiliate links I do get a small Kickback uh so I appreciate you using them but as always no pressure just like to share the information with you I hope you enjoyed this video I definitely had some fun playing around with this it's like I said I've done it just a couple times before it'll be fun to have this in my shop and uh we'll see where it goes but uh if you have any questions or comments about this or anything else you've seen in my workshop go ahead and leave that down below if you thought this video was fun or informational hit that like button and if you're new here want to see more what I do in the workshop uh do hit that subscribe button I appr appreciate it otherwise uh we will be back again with more projects product reviews and informational videos instructional videos soon so stay tuned otherwise I hope you can get out into your Workshop make something too we'll catch you next time

Channel: Vintauri

Views: 8,775

Keywords: diode laser, laser, hobby laser, laser enclosure, sculpfun, sculpfun enclosure, xtool, ortur, atomstack, Comgrow, laser safety, 10w laser, 5w laser, laser tutorial, basic laser engraver, laser cutting, laser engraving, china laser, laser tips, workshop laser, Laser files, Diode laser project, Wainlux L6, Sculpfun S30, Atzer Laser, Honeycomb, 20w laser, Wizmaker, portable laser, xtool F1, Amazon, xTool p2, Vector drawing, co2 laser, xTool Creative Space, screen printing

Id: tpZpSwSOCYg

Length: 34min 13sec (2053 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 19 2023