 Today, I'm going to show you how to make a quick template for burning things like this coaster over and over. My name's Jim and this is The Edge of Tech. So recently, my wife and I launched a brand new website. I'll put the link in the description below, but we've been selling a ton of different cork coasters, so I had to come up with a good way to burn eight of these at a time. I reached out to my friend Walter over at Country 3D a couple months ago and he gave me a really great idea on how to make a template. So I've been doing that and I modified it a little bit to make it even more reliable on the Ortur Laser Master 2. Now you can do this on any laser you have and it's going to work, but I'm using the Ortur Laser Master 2 in this video. So today, I'm going to show you how to make a template to burn eight of these coasters and make them reliable every single time. In the end, I'm going to include the Lightburn file that we create today. You can find it in the description below to download if you just want the file right away. But in this video, I'm actually going to show you how we do it. That way you know going forward. Let's do it. So when I reached out to Walter, he actually told me to grab poster boards, something like this. Now this is white and it's really washed out, but it's a big piece of poster board. Now I really like using poster board because it's very easy to cut, it's very easy to put down under your laser and you can just throw it away when you're done. The poster board is not very expensive. In my city, this is only a couple bucks a sheet and we can actually use each sheet like this a couple times with our lasers. So the first thing I want to do is make this a little bit smaller because I can't use this full sheet in the Oortour Laser Master 2. So I'm going to fold it in half and I'm just going to literally break this sheet straight in half. So I creased it a couple times and if you keep going back and forth, it'll start getting brittle because it is a thicker piece of paper. Once you do that, you can actually just take and pull it apart like that. And you don't have to worry if it's perfect because it doesn't really matter. So now we have half a sheet of poster board like that. Now I'm going to use the half a sheet we just took and create that template. Alright, so I'm going to open up Lightburn and that's going to give us our workspace here. My laser is already connected. I'm using the Oortour Laser Master 2 in this video. And the first thing I want to do is come over to the left and grab the circle tool. And I'm just going to make a quick circle just like that. Now this could be a square or any other shape you want. But in my case, I want to make it for those coasters so I'm going to make a circle. Now what I need to do next is make sure that this circle is the exact same size as what I need. In my case, I know that this is four inches around. So I'm going to come up here, I'm going to click this little button right here which will take us between inches and millimeters. I'm going to click the little arrow to make sure I'm selecting our circle. I'm going to unlock it here. I'm going to do four, so four, enter, height, four, enter. So we have a four by four inch circle. Now I'm going to lock this so it does not change the dimensions if I move this around on accident. Now I know we want eight of these to create two full sets of four in my case. So what I want to do next is highlight this. I'm going to go up here to arrange and I'm going to go to grid or array. Now I want, I'll move this over here. Now I want a couple columns just like that. So what I did was in the X column, I just did the up arrow and you see one adds. I'll do it twice so we get three across here and I want to do the same thing down. Now this actually gives us nine circles but we'll fix that in a minute. So I'll hit OK and that gives us our grid here. In this case, I'm going to hit the control button and A to highlight all or select all and I'm just going to move that right here to the center of our workspace or about the center. Now I want to get rid of one of these because I only need eight. In my case, I'll just get rid of this bottom one like this. So now we have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight circles. So once you have all your circles here, there's a couple things that I like to do and there's one very important thing that I like to do to make sure that this is always in the same spot. What I want to do is come to the bottom right and make sure you're on absolute coordinates. So hit absolute coordinates. That means when you hit the home button on your printer, no matter what, this is going to be in the same spot every single time. If you wanted to, you could actually come over here and you can make a position, a saved position. In our case, it's just going to be home. So we don't really have to do that. As long as you know you want to home this every single time and using absolute coordinates, this is going to find these circles in the same spot every single time. Now that you have your circles, we need to cut these out and there's a bunch of different ways to do this. I just happened to like doing it one by one just in case something goes wrong. So I'm actually going to go through and I'm going to select each circle and I'm going to give it a different layer or color down here. Each one of these colors represents a different layer. Now I like to do this because it will go through each one first before it goes on to the next one. And if you do this correctly and something goes wrong, you can stop the burn before it does too much damage. And you can probably just reuse that poster board and move this a little bit and still be okay if one of the circles doesn't work. In our case, we needed eight total circles. So that last one here needs to be this one. So I have zero through seven here. They're all on the output, which is great. You want to go down here and you want to make them all line just like that. So what we have here is actually eight different layers and it's going to do one at a time. So in our case, it's going to start here and just kind of work its way down. Once you have all your circles in layers here, we want to set up that they're all aligned so we got that done. That means it's not going to fill in the center, it's just going to draw one line around in a circle. Then we need to do a speed and a power. So I double clicked on the first one there and it'll bring up this just like this. So I want to slow this way down. In my case, we're using millimeters a minute. Let's slow this thing down to like 500 and use like 85% power. And then on the left side here, just go to the next one. You want to do 500, same thing. What I do, 85% power, I think, yep. And then do that for all of them. And what we're going to do is burn it at this speed and this power. And if it doesn't cut through, we'll actually just run it again. It's not that big a deal. And then hit enter when you're done. Now if everything is correct on the right side here, you'll see speed and power. You'll be 585, 500 speed, 85 power. And then if you hit the down arrow, it's all the same. Now sometimes I like to do two passes just in case the first one doesn't work and then you don't have to go back and do this a second time. So let's do that just in case. So open that back up, click this up to two, go down, click this up to two, go down. And if it does go all the way through, that's okay too. We kind of want it to. So each one of these at 500 speed and 85% power, I'm going to hit oops. Two, hit okay. So now if I go down here, I see that they're all 500, they're all 85% power and the pass count is two on each one. Now we're actually ready to go over to the laser. So let's do that now. So what I did was I took the poster board that we ripped in half and I just set it on the bed of the laser as you can see now. Now what we need to do is frame it out and make sure that it's in a good spot. So what I'm going to do now is hold the shift key and hit the frame button which will power our laser and just do an outline frame of where the whole template is going to take place. So far we're looking great. It looks like we just made it with the piece that we cut and if you want to adjust it to be a little bit more in the template, that's totally fine. Okay, so now that we know that it is in a good spot here, I'm just going to tape it down. You can do this many different ways. In my case, I'm just going to grab some tape, throw it on here carefully just because I'm trying to film. There we go. Just so it doesn't move. Because once you get this template down, you do not want it to move. So I'm just going to tape it down right to my chip board or my waste board underneath the laser there. I'm going to do two on the sides and one right along the top. So now that we have everything taped down, we can actually start to do the burn. So now all we have to do is hit the home button in light burn. So I'm going to hit the home button now and it home and I'm going to hit the start button to start that burn. Now you want to grab your glasses and just watch that and make sure it's working here. In my case, it looks like I got a little bit close, but I can tell you that the 500 speed is probably going to be plenty. Now it's going on to the second line. It's going around a second time and I'm hoping this time it goes all the way through. So now that we're done, you see the eight circles and I like to take a razor and let's just make sure that they are cut out. In our case, it looks like they're pretty much cut out. So I'll pop each one of these eight out carefully and you just want to be very careful that you don't move the template. Looks like the laser did a good job. It looks like our settings were pretty good there. So then you have all of your circles that you just pulled out right here and I'm just going to throw those in the trash. Or you can use them for another project if you have another project to use them for. Like an air hose, you can blow it off, you can however you want. Just make sure all this is off. But now we have our template here. We have all eight. The next thing I would do is take one of my coasters. I would place it right inside of there, just like this. As you can see, it pretty much goes in there just perfect. And depending on which way you flip these, I like the big side up on these. There's one side that's a little bit bigger. But anyways, it'll go in there perfect. It'll tell you exactly where to drop them. So all you have to do now is go back to the laser, set up your files and I'm going to show you that now and then hit start. So now that the cut is all done, as you saw, and everything is good to go, what do we do now? Well, there's a couple last steps. Number one, we want to save this. So go up to file, we're going to hit save. In my case, I already had it saved. So you'll hit save here and it'll prompt you to where you want to save it. So make sure you do that. It's going to save it as a light burn file so you can always open this back up. Now the next thing you want to do, because you already have these burned in, you don't want to burn these in when you actually do your templates. So I like to highlight them all with control A or you can make a big square around them all and highlight them. And I'm going to make them a tool path right here, the T1. So once you make them a tool path just like this, this is identical to what we had before, but this is not going to burn in. It will frame, so it'll show the frame if you try, but it won't burn in any time you do any of your projects. Now what I like to do from here is I go file, save as, and I'm going to do 8 coaster template tool or whatever you want to call it. You can do an 8 coaster template, whatever you want to do. I do tool just so I know it's the tool path version. So I have two versions. I have one that's going to burn it. If I ever want to burn it again, I have one that's just going to be the tool path. And you say, Jim, what do I do now? So in my case, what I would do is I'd go up here to the little import button. I'd click it. It will take me to where I have all of my stuff. This is what I'm going to burn on my coasters. I'm going to shrink it down like this. I'm going to grab the very center so you see the crosshair there, and I'm going to bring it back up like this. And I know in our case that our coaster is 4x4, this template is. So I want to make this just slightly smaller than that so it looks something like this. Now if you use the crosshairs here, you're actually going to center inside of that coaster every single time. Once you do that, you want to assign it a layer. In this case, I'll use number one. I like to use fill. With my coasters, I like to use 4,020% fill and only one pass. I don't need to do two passes and I hit OK. So that will give you your very first one. Still looks like it's a little big here, so I'm going to size it down just a little more just so it fits in there better. There we go. So once you get it sized exactly how you want it, if you want to make the same ones, all you have to do is hit CTRL C to copy it. Come over here and paste. Come over here and paste. Come over here and paste. Now grab it, center it just like you did before, just like that, and now you're ready. So what I prefer to do just like my other stuff, I like to make each one of these a different layer. That way if one of them fails, I can stop it and it doesn't burn all of them at once. And in my experience, it actually goes faster like this. So what I need to do is change all of these to just fill and all of them need to go to 4,020% and then one pass. And also I want to make sure our line interval is the same for all of them. In my case, I like 0.11. So they're all the same and these are ready to go. Now you can take another file and make another four coasters here if you wanted to. In this case, I'm actually just going to make one of these to show you. We're going to bounce back to the camera. I'm going to put a coaster in our template and then we're going to hit the burn button. So all I'm going to do now is hit my start button in light burn and you're actually going to see the laser go right to where it's supposed to go and start this burn. All right. That's it. We now have the grogu or baby Yoda. I need coffee coaster and it looks like this. That's pretty awesome. I really love this. I'm going to throw it right here on my desk and I'm going to set my water right on it just like that. Now what's really cool about this is you can do as many as you want. So if you wanted to do four of one, if you wanted to do eight different coasters, you can do whatever you want. Just put a different graphic in each one and I really prefer the vector files. That's a completely different video showing you how to make a vector file. But if you can find a vector file, that is my favorite to burn because it's so much faster. Now you know how to create the template and then save it and then use that template to put your pictures in and then start your burns. Like I said, you want to use that home button every time you start a burn. That way your laser goes back to home first. Also, you want to make sure that in the bottom you're using that absolute coordinates. But as long as you keep that template taped down, you don't have to worry about it. You can keep using that over and over. Now if you ever take the template off, you could always just create a new one. Grab a new piece of poster board, burn it and start over. It only takes about 10 minutes from start to finish to create the template and burn it. In this case, the burn template and the toolpath template will both be in a description below for you to download if you want to. So you can do that and use it right in light burn. Now this will only be for the laser master 2 or a similar sized laser and you may have to adjust your speed and burn settings to get it to burn all the way through your poster board. Well, I hope you guys learned something today. Keep burning. Hey everybody. I hope you guys liked the video. I hope it taught you something. Give me that thumbs up if you did. Hit the subscribe button right here and hit that little bell if you want to get notified anytime we go live on HotMakes or anytime a great video like this comes out. Have you seen this one? Now that's a good one. That's the one I want you to use. That is funny.