 We just made five practical personalization projects using our X-Tool D1 desktop laser and we'll show you what we learned right now. What is up? Welcome back. Do you like to do a builder and make it? So do we. And we have a new video each week. This week we're doing five practical personalization projects that you could do with the X-Tool D1 desktop laser. We unboxed our laser last week. We set it up. We ran the test projects and it was great. But what we didn't get a chance to do was work with our material sets that came with the laser. All kinds of materials. So we have five projects we worked on this week and we wanted to share some of our lessons learned. Actually, we have a bonus project. Oh yeah, that's a bonus project. Practical personalization project number one. Silicone rings. Yeah. Garrett had to put them all on for this video. I was so excited to see these rings in the material pack. What was that? Maybe six months ago Garrett lost his wedding ring and had to actually he flung it. His ring was made from heavy tungsten and he flung it washing his hands and then couldn't find it. So he decided to replace it and we replaced it with a silicone band and it's been great. When I saw these silicone bands, I thought, wow, we could really do some cool personalization on these bands. So that was our first project. Like put my address in there. If lost, please return to Kim. So what did we learn from the silicone rings? Well, the first couple of attempts, they were backwards and mirrored and we couldn't figure out why. Well, it's very important that the rotary attachment is as the instruction said pointed in the correct direction. It is definitely one direction, one direction, like the band, and that's the direction you need to use it in. Otherwise, your projects are going to strangely appear backwards and mirrored. Other than that, these came out beautifully. I would recommend using a thicker font than what we used. It looks nice and cursive and it did come out cursive, but you can't really see the final image. So we added a little paint marker pen to it, wiped it off with an alcohol wipe and you can see the image a little bit better. So my recommendation is keep the rotary attachment in the correct direction and use a thick font. And this only took about two minutes. Practical personalization project number two. Stamps. I was kind of stoked on stamps. I've never made one before. All right. I was going to say, so if you watched last week's video, you saw that I was pretty excited about the rubber pad here, this rubber mat. Now this size could be used for a little hot pad or anything, but we chose to engrave it and make a stamp out of it. I don't have any major tips for this one. It worked beautifully. First try. Just this is general stamp pad tips. You'll need to use the negative of your image. So if Kim and Garrett would normally be in black, you'll want to make sure that's white and everything around Kim and Garrett, put a little box around it and fill that with a darker color because that's what will engrave. And we made our knockout using Illustrator and the divide tool. This project took about 30 minutes. Practical personalization project number three. Acrylic tags. I was also really excited about the acrylic tags. We haven't really done anything with acrylic and I really like how they send you all the little parameters for the laser for each material. Everything in the material box had its own cut guide, engrave guide, speed and power. And some precautions. Like acrylic is not good for indoors. So we took this outside. You'll see the footage is a little bit different. We took it outside into the shop area where there was a little more ventilation than what we have in this closed room with no windows. Now this project was very easy as well. Our tip for this one is to elevate your acrylic off of your cutting surface just a little bit. If you'll notice on ours, you'll see some burn marks on the cutting surface and there was a little burn on the back of the acrylic. Other than that, it worked perfectly. Took about 25 minutes per name. Practical personalization project number four. Stainless steel pendants. Necklaces. Some bling. Yeah. I was really excited about this one too. It actually came in the baggy with this chain, this little steel ring and a pendant. So I actually put two pendants on this one because we engraved our daughter's names on them. These are great gift items, perfect for personalization. You can personalize these with your kids' names, your grandkids' names, your dog's name, your cat's name, yeah, pet's names on them, anything. For this one, it was very simple. I don't have a whole lot of tips for this one other than alignment. So we really learned how to align our laser by working on this one. Really my tip is trust the red laser cross. It may look like it's all center, but the laser will move to it when it goes to cut. So trust the laser. This engraving only took about four minutes. Practical personalization project number five. Personalized signs. You know, like a baby name sign. This is a 15 and a half inch baby name sign. It says hi because I didn't want to put any babies on blast. Yeah, don't put any babies on blast. The best part of this project was I was just able to take the X tool and set it right on a full sheet of plywood that I got from Home Depot. And then I just hit score and cut. It took about 45 minutes to complete the whole cut and scoring. Bonus practical personalization project, tumblers. This is why I love this machine. The tumblers are so easy and we did them two different ways. We did coated metal and then we did etching. So if you joined us over on Patreon last week, you'll know that we did a tumbler with some sublimation and engraving, but we learned a few things and I wanted to include those in this week's video. We tried two methods on this tumbler. The first we used a stainless steel setting. This is the same setting we used on the necklace that we showed earlier and this took about 90 minutes to engrave, but left a black background on this white tumbler. Looks cool. And it does. It looks cool. The second method, we used the coated metal setting like we did on the business card in last week's video. This took about 18 minutes so it was much faster, but left that stainless steel finish on the white tumbler. It also looks cool, but took a lot less time. Yeah, super cool. Now everybody's been wondering, thinking about this entire video, thinking about since last week, will it cut quarter inch MDF? Yes it will. This cut took about one minute. It took two passes at 100%, two millimeters per second. One minute though. I have the air assist on the way. There's an air assist that comes with this. And once I get it, I'll try the same cut right here that we did with eighth inch birch out of quarter inch MDF. See how long it takes. See if it's doable. Put it through its paces. It's not fast, but it will do it. Alright, what was your favorite project? Do you have any tips, tricks, anything that you could share in a comment down below to help everybody out with this thing? I mean, I don't know about you, but this has now become my tumbler machine. I love how it does the tumblers, and I will be engraving all my tumblers. A special thanks to all of our patrons, they're right over here. We love you guys. Well, I'm excited to try some more projects. I think there's lots more that you can do with this tool. If you guys have an X-Tool, let us know what you've done with it. And if you want an X-Tool, let us know what you want to make with it. Because I'm wondering what other materials, what other type of craft projects that you could make with this tool. I'm excited about it. It's been fun so far. Yeah, and I love seeing what everybody else comes up with. You guys are pretty ingenious with some of the things that you come up with. And with that, we are about out of time. So if you're not going to join us over on Patreon for the after show, we will see you next week where we'll do it, build it, and make it again. I'm just going to close this out. I'm just going to close it out with a good old sign balance. Woo! This is super light.