 What is up? A welcome back! If you're new to lasers or you've been using lasers for a while, you've heard the term curfing. And you might be asking yourself, really what is curfing and why do I care? If your project includes tabs and slots, you're making a puzzle, you're doing an inlay, or you're even trying to bend some wood, you're gonna need a good understanding of curfing and how to use it. So welcome to our mini masterclass on curfing. What is it? You've probably heard the old adage, measure twice, cut once, and you still come up short. That's probably because you cut on the line, not accounting for curfing. Curfing is the amount of material removed during a cut, whether it's with a saw blade or a laser beam. And while you can measure the width of your saw blade, you can't exactly measure the width of a laser beam. And that's not all. There are other factors that affect curfing, such as materials. Solid or a hardwood works differently than a plywood, which is different than acrylic. How about laser settings? A low high powered burn will take away more material than a high speed low power burn. So if you can't measure the width of your laser beam, we're gonna measure the width of our curfing. We're gonna go into our laser software. We'll draw a one inch square, a perfect one inch square. We'll cut it out with our laser, measure this one inch square with some calipers. Once we have our measurement, we're gonna take that measurement, subtract that from our original one inch, then we'll divide that number by two. And we're gonna divide by two because there has been a laser cut on either side of the square. So we only want the width of the curve on one side. Now that we know the size of our laser beam, we can account for curfing. So we'll go back into our laser software and adjust for it. Inside Glowforge, you'll have to adjust the design. Inside Xtool's creative space, we'll use an offset. And inside Lightburn, we'll use the curve settings inside that cut layer. For us, it's .001. So we'll just add .001 to our design for our curfing inside Lightburn. And we'll cut that one more time. We have our perfect one inch square, which means we have confirmed our curf. Our curf is .001 inch. If I take this new square and put it in the original hole, it's a much tighter fit. It will not fall out. And if I try to take the original square and put it in the new hole, it doesn't fit. I can't really get it in there. Can't see an even tighter fit. What if you don't have calipers or hate math? Garrett has created a set of tools and templates that you can use to calculate your curfing or calculate your image setting. So if I have a laser board and I have our old template here, we can figure out which size our laser board is. This one fits loosely. This one's fits loosely right here. This one fits perfectly. And believe it or not, this one actually measures .25. But what if I make this cut? You know you're gonna have some play in there. I may want to put this at something like .249. Now that fits snugly. That's what I want to set our image to for our tabs and slot curfing. Puzzles and inlays are a little bit different. With the tabs and slats, you're mainly worried about the material thickness. With inlays and puzzles, you're more worried about how it fits together, how one part may fit into the other and you're looking at gaps in the curved areas. Now if you follow our channel, you know we do a lot of door rounds and sometimes we'll do a puzzle piece door round. Now for a door round, you're gonna want a nice tight fit so it doesn't turn into a wind chime. For puzzles and inlays, we've created a puzzle piece template. Here we've cut a puzzle piece with zero curfing. You can see that this is very loose. You can see a gap in the wood and it's not gonna hold. Now that's great if you're doing a kids puzzle, but if you're doing something with inlays, then you're definitely gonna want a tighter curf here. So here with this one with a .001 curfing on either side, we get a nice snug fit. You can see here that these aren't coming apart easily. They have a nice snug fit and this is gonna be great, especially if you're doing different types of woods such as maples inlaid with cherry. You're gonna want a nice tight fit here. This you can cut on your different materials and test the fit. When you start getting up to the 2.002, the fit is tight enough that once I get it together, I don't think I'll be able to get it apart. On the opposite end of the spectrum, if we start subtracting from the curf or doing an inward curf, there's more play and it becomes looser. With these templates, you can mix and match and find what works in each of the different settings. So if I can do a negative one and a positive two, I still get a pretty good fit. Next up, we're gonna bend wood, also known as a living hinge. We're gonna use the same method by removing material. We can create a bend in our wood. We downloaded a bunch of patterns from Etsy from our friends over at Dottie Design Co. To demonstrate the different ways that you can cut patterns and bend wood. Now, this is a straight line pattern and the tighter the cuts, the more flexible the wood is going to be. At 1.75, this wood has more of a bend to it. At 2.5, you'll see there's less of a bend and then at 4.0, there's just a slight bend. And there are so many different patterns out there. This is a bowling hinge and this will allow us to bend our eighth inch birch. This is a fabric hinge. The fabric hinges will allow you to bend in multiple directions, not just up and down, but also a little bit side to side. This also works for multiple thicknesses. Here we have quarter inch MDF and with the tighter pattern, we can get more of a bend. Here's another example of the more material removed, the larger the bend. This one is a brick pattern and you can really bend this one as well. This is going to give you a lot of curve. There are lots of projects where you can use bendable wood. You can make things like lampshades, jewelry, earrings, bracelets. You can make boxes. You can add corners and round corners on different types of projects. There are so many different fun things that you could do that you may not have considered where you can bend the wood to give your project a whole new look. And you can join us over on Patreon for more advanced techniques. If you wanted to create a project with thicker materials like this one, then you'll need to consider things like different lenses, different focal heights, your air pressure and flow. All of these can affect your curving. With what you've learned in today's mini masterclass, you'll be curving like a pro.