 We just made this LED acrylic sign using our X-Tool D1 10 watt laser and we'll show you how we did it right now. What is up? A welcome back. Do you like to do a builder to make it? So do we. We have a new video each week. This week we're answering some viewer comments. A couple of weeks ago we did a video on how to engrave a photo on acrylic using our CO2 laser, omtech polar laser, 50 watt laser. And so we got a lot of comments because we do lots of X-Tool videos. Hey, will the X-Tool, the diode laser, which is only 10 watts, will it do a photo and grave on acrylic? And it will. And so this week we're going to show you how. Step one, we're going to gather all of our supplies. We needed some acrylic blanks and some LED bases. We got these on Amazon for like five bucks a piece. Yeah, and you can buy these in packages and kits. So you can get them in multiple quantities. You can buy them at a greater discount the more you buy. Yeah, the more you buy, the cheaper they are. And we need a piece of black cardstock. And that is it. Oh, and the next tool. Step two, we're going to make all of our cuts. Well, we can't cut clear acrylic with a diode. We can only engrave. That was one of the biggest lessons learned during this project. We did a try or attempt to cut the acrylic. And guess what? It doesn't work. So we did a little more research, a little more digging. And we learned that with a diode laser, which is a blue light laser, you cannot cut clear acrylic and you cannot cut blue acrylic. You can cut black, red, any of the other colors, but you can't cut the clear acrylic. So you're going to need the light kit that comes with the acrylic blanks for the toppers. And then you can engrave on those. So you can engrave, but you can't cut it. So step two is not make all your cuts. Step two is make all your engravings. We're going to start here in image r.com. First thing you're going to want to do is remove the background from our image. It's going to make the engrave go a lot faster and it's going to look a little bit nicer. So we're going to go to the tab for remove background. We're going to scroll past the ads and click upload. And here's our little selfie for engraving. We'll give it just a couple of seconds. The screen will refresh. Here's our original image. And here's the image without the background. Looks great. So we're just going to download it. And then next we're going to go over to image r. Here we're going to prepare our image for laser engraving. So again, we're going to hear all the steps on how to do it. It basically runs you right through it across the bottom. So the first thing we're going to do is upload. And this is the image that we exported. So I'm going to bring that in. Here we are. And next we're going to crop the image through all this extra space here. So I'm going to scroll over here and choose a square crop. Just going to bring this in. Whoa. Try that again. What do you think? That looks pretty good, huh? Yeah, I think we're pretty centered. All right. So here we're just going to say crop. Looks good. Next we're going to resize our image. I'm going to change it to inches. And for what we're doing, we're going to do four inches. Yep. Height and width. And then we're going to change the DPI to 300. When you're engraving a photo, you want to hire dots per inch DPI. And leave it as fixed aspect ratio. That means it's going to adjust the width and height at the same time. Hit OK. You have to scroll down each time. And now that we've resized, I'm not going to add any text, but you could. Next I'm going to select material. So here when we did our previous engraving, we use the CO2 laser. For the diode laser, you're going to select Norton. See here, mostly used in diode lasers. And we're going to say Norton acrylic. We're going to click OK. Here there's a bunch of other adjustments that we can do. But for purposes of today's project, we look beautiful. And I'm just going to download this image. And we're going to download it as a PNG. Next we're going to move over to the X tool software. So here we are in X tool creative space. This is super simple as well. We're just going to select image. There is our diode laser image. I didn't point this out on the last screen. But if you notice it actually mirrored it for us. Because last time when we engraved it, we did mirror it and it engraves on the top. But with this particular laser and for clear acrylic, the laser beam actually goes right through that clear acrylic and engraves on the backside. So if I engrave it like this, this is actually mirrored from the way the photo was taken. So I can reflect it and put it right back to where it was. So when it engraves using this diode laser, it engraves in the proper aspect ratio. Here it says I'm going to change the size a little bit. We're actually going to shrink this down just a little bit. And we're going to do 3.25 and keep it at 3.25. That fits better on the little acrylic backer that we were given. And then we're going to change our material settings. We're going to leave it at laser flat. We're going to leave it at user defined material for our laser. Now this could change and you could do a speed power test. But for us, we did a few tests here and we found that 70% power and speed of 50 with one pass works for us. We're going to leave it and change our lines per centimeter here to 280. Scroll that down close to 300 and leave it at grayscale, bi-directional and click process. If you enable the little laser pointer, I'll go frame it. Just press the button on the X tool. Alright, looks good. So framing complete and we're going to start the job. I get all the glory. Yeah. We learned a few things engraving on this clear acrylic. We learned that the beam does go all the way through the clear acrylic. So you want to make sure you take off the coating from top or bottom if it has any coating on it. It does burn in the back. So it's going to need something for that beam to bounce off of. And we found that the black cardstock works the best. We tried multiple colors, black worked the best. And then if it leaves any char on the back, which it will, a little cleaner here will get that off. Or a little magic eraser will take the char right off the back. Three, assembly. This has to be the second easiest assembly ever. I'm just going to insert it into the LED base. So dare I say, it's tied for number one. It's tied for number one. And there you go. The great thing about these bases is you can choose your light settings. This is on scrolling through multiple colors, but you can set these at one color and leave it all the colors. It did come with a remote, but I lost it when I opened it. Step four, profit. So the base and the blank cost me about $5. It does come with the remote. And then my X tool charges me about $5 an hour for any cut times or engraved times. So all in $10. And for an LED light up acrylic sign about this size, I see them going anywhere from $15 to $20. It took about an hour. So if you were going to go larger size, you'll make a little bit more money. I've seen those going up to $40 for some that are maybe about this tall. So what would that be? Six or eight inches tall? Yeah, you can get blanks that are about six to eight inches tall, too. So those go for up to like $40 or actually I did see one for $50, but that one seemed a little on the high end of the range. And at the craft shows, we've seen whole booths set up with just selling these, just engraving different comical signs, Mother's Day, Father's Day, Teacher's Signs, there's so many different things you can do. And then you can charge a little bit more for something like this with the personalization, of course, with a photo on it. So pretty good chunk of change. This is a good turn. All right, the file creation was super easy. And then you just kind of let your laser do its thing. So these are super easy to make. You could probably pump these out. Well, I guess not pump these out. But you can create a whole craft booth on just light up LED acrylic signs. All right. Well, we are about out of time. So if you're not going to join us for the patron after show, we will see you next week where we'll do it, build it and make it again. That thing is way too small to balance. Oh, hey, and don't forget to join us on Tuesdays where we go live. Last week we did something in Illustrator, but we usually just do some sign painting or crafting. So come join us. Kimmy D here. And I'm going to lay down with a little track for you. I need some background music. We got the film. We want to take it off. Both sides. Both sides. We want it off both sides. We got the beam. It goes all the way through. Burns in the back. Burns in the back. Yes.