The Ultimate Guide: Laser Engraved Personalized Pencils Jig and Template

we only have 30 days before school starts and only 30 days to sell back to school pencils if we can't get them engraved and personalized shipped and delivered before school starts then we won't have happy customers and they won't be back next year what is up welcome back do you like to do a build or make it so do we we have new videos each week we have so many tips and tricks inside light burn today I mean we're going to get deep into some light bur things that will really help you save time keep things efficient and keep things repeatable these are some tools that we hadn't really seen before or used before we just learned about them and I'm really excited to show you this is the perfect project to show you on what they can do and how you can use them I think you're going to be able to use them making those ornaments this [Music] Christmas step one we're going to gather all of our supplies we needed some pencils because we're engraving on pencils now you can use any pencils but I think we all know that the taon D Rogas are the best pencils but they're just yellow so at your local Walmart you can get this pack of pastel pencils 12 of them super cheap and they engraved great we know Kim is a pencil connoisseur I am only the best for Kim we also needed some quarter in MDF this is what we're going to cut our jig out of we have quter inch because we have a lot of quter inch you you can do it in acrylic yeah go ahead yeah you can do it you can really use anything you can use acrylic you can use E8 in Baltic Birch you know even cardboard whatever you have laying around you can create a jig out of and that is it step two we're going to make our jig The Jig Is Not up we have to go make it right now and we're going to do that inside lightburn here we are on lightburn I'm excited to show you some cool things we're going to start by drawing out our pencil shape we're going to do that by using our rectangle tool I'm just going to draw a shape and since I know exactly what size I need I'm going to come up and make sure my aspect ratio is unlocked and for the width I need 7.75 in and for the height I'm going to go 3 in and because all of my cuts are done on the red layer I'm going to go ahead and put this on the red layer while it's still selected now I'm going to going to use the array tool to give me a 12 pencils High three pencils wide so I'll click my little array tool well it's still selected and we'll say three columns and then for y we'll say whoops not 21 12 going to zoom in a little bit using my scroll on my mouse and uh the spacing looks fine I think I'll bring him a little closer together a little closer together that's it good to go I'm going to Center my workspace again back out now let's draw some registration marks we're going to use these registration marks later on to line up our engrave let's zoom in a little bit because I'm going to make a tiny little circle and with my circle tool selected I'm just going to drag a circle over I'm going to hold shift so it keeps set a circle circle now I want this only like a/ in tall so I'm going to lock my aspect ratio and we'll say point5 I need some crosshairs in here I need it to look like a Target because we'll be lining up a Target later on so I'm going to use my pencil tool I'm going to click and while I'm dragging down I'll hold shift I'll click again and I have this thing is all floating around I'll hit Escape gets me out of the pencil tool I'm going to just use my select I want this to be 75 3/4 of an inch I'm going to do control D to duplicate it now I'm going to hold shift while I rotate it on its axis and I'll snap on the like 15s I'm going to grab everything now and we'll come up here to This Little Bull ey thing which will align Center and vertical or horizontal and vertical and let's group it so it stays together contrl G now this is going to be like a deep engrave but I want to turn it off later so let's go ahead and put this on the Green Layer and I'm going to go ahead and control C to copy and I'm going to bring it down here I'm going to use my scroll button to zoom in and out I'm going to come back down to the right hand side down below so now it's going to paste Center of wherever my cursor is so contrl +v now I got one down here just line that up on the edge now if I if I press my scroll key I can grab the canvas and move it so it gives me a little hand let's just move this guy down here now I want to be able to cut this whole little jig out and move this jig around with me take it with me wherever I go so let's cut this whole little jig out and let's make this part of the cut layer put that back on the cut layer all right now while I'm carrying this jig around town I don't want to forget what this jig is so I'm going to write up top what this Jig Is So This is for back to school pencils I made it a really long jig name just kind of Center it over here let's throw this on the Green Layer cuz it's going to be a deep engrave all right that is it that's our jig so simple so simple all right let's cut this guy out let's set my parameters real quick so I'm going to use a 130 W laser so I'm going to go 10 mm a second we're cutting this out of/ qu inch MDF 10 mm a second so we'll do a 50% power 50% power now for my score I'm going to want to go like 200 mm/ second and we'll say 30% power cuz I want a pretty deep score I probably want to score this before I cut it so let's move that up all right let's go cut this out I'm going to take the quarter inch MDF over to the Eon Nova 14 and we're going to cut out our jig now you can make your template any size you want you can do this in a desktop laser you can do one set of 12 pencils whatever will fit in your laser this is pretty flexible I've seen this done on the F1 the ultra F1 Ultra uh any of the p2s S1 I even seen it done on the D1 yep so you can do this with any laser that you have step three it's time to create our template now that we have our jig we're going to do a jig over to lightburn to make our template now we're ready to make our template so we're going to start with a spreadsheet here we are we've created this spreadsheet pencil names for template. CSV we want this a this needs to be a CSV not an XLS it needs to be comma deiminated yes so here let's say we have orders for three different name sets of pencils Garrett Kim and Tanner and we're going to make this mirror our templat so we've got them in three columns Garrett Kim Tanner we're going to copy those down we've got 12 rows so now Kim gets 12 pencils Tanner gets 12 pencils for Garrett I'm going to add a number here so that we can use this for demonstration purposes because we're going to show you some offset values here in a moment perfect yep so we'll save this now yep let's go back to lightburn back to lightburn and now we're going to make so this is our JY we're going to make this so we're not going to cut this I would say take that red layer and make it no output that's right no output for both red and green all right so now this is just going to be set up for our engrave portion of this project so we can see it but it's not going to cut it won't send it to the machine next we're going to create some variables and put those on top of the pencil so we're going to Y do that I'm going to go over here to my text tool so so we're going to create some text we'll just zoom in on my pencil and we'll click and to create a variable I'm going to start by using my percent and then we're going to use the first space that's available at for a variable which is zero so this is this is going to represent the column in your spreadsheet so now we'll shrink this down to fit on the pencil I we'll just do it this way make it point 17 in high we'll zoom in I want to leave about an inch and a half from the end of the pencil to where the words start so we'll miss the Eraser and uh it won't look like the words are right up at the top so to do that I'll draw a little box just what's this oh about an inch and a half great we just make it an inch and a half and we'll put this on the Green Layer o I can barely see it I'll show output for now so I can see it move my text over now I'm going to try to Center this text on here but my keys make it go too far and if I hold shift it goes really far but if I hold control I get smaller movements but it's still not small enough movements so I'm going to go up to my settings over here where it says shape move increments I'm going to change mine to 01 okay now I'm going to hold control and it really moves about a pixel now up here I'm going to change some things for my text this is like for my text so if I click off you see it goes gray if I click it it comes back first I want to align left not Center or middle and then we're going to set this text to merge CSV I'm going to use my array tool to populate my pencils so back to my array tool so now we're going to use one column and because it's say column zero this is going to be the Garrett pencil and then we're going to have 12 rows and then we're going to align those on the pencil so I'll just change my y spacing till it gets close it's way too big it's way too small see . 29 that's pretty good yeah that looks pretty good all right we're cool with that and then right here you'll see that we have Auto increment variable text one so this is going to represent the rows on your spreadsheet so because we're going to use 12 rows it's going to autoincrement each row so that's why we've kept the numbers here you're going to see how those populate here in a moment we'll say okay and now we'll duplicate these we'll grab holding shift I'll grab my little uh green spacer here and I'll say contrl d now let's say I had clicked off yeah because I see you purposely kept it kept it selected you were you knew what you were doing but when I did this I did not keep it selected what's your little trick for selecting all the rows without selecting the actual pencils oh well let me finish dragging this over so while I'm dragging this over I'm holding shift so it stays on this line it doesn't really move when I jiggle my my cursor so if I needed to select everything here let's say we accidentally ungrouped it right it's ungrouped and I need to select everything real quick there's two ways I can do this one I can drag from the top left to the bottom right which will only select everything it encapsulates or I can turn off show red and then I can grab everything and I can bring back the red and then I can group it again good little tip so I said we're going to ungroup this actually contrl Z let's not ungroup it yet let's grab this guy we're going to duplicate this one more time I'm going to drag it over hold shift now this is probably the most tedious part I'm going to ungroup and in here I'm going to turn all of these to one let's just well this is one way to do it how would you do it I would do the array again you did a great job you know what your spacing is you should be able to just create percent one and array it one more time you know what she's right let's do it that way so I'm going to hide this red I'm going to grab these we'll say ungroup I'll grab these again delete I'll grab this guy hit my array I know it's 12 well wait you need to make it a three uh I mean a two for column two column three oh good catch bab double click so again the percents here are representing the different columns so Garrett Kimberly this is Tanner 012 all right now we'll array it we'll say [Music] 12 let's bring back the red yeah looks good all right let's uh group all these guys again group now let's um test this out let's see I have all of my variables set so we'll go over to our variable text Tab and if you don't see your variable text tab you can come up to window and down at the bottom a variable text we'll open this window we're going to start by browse we're going to load our CSV file and now since I have everything set up I can use this little button here to test there you go now you see that Garrett over here let's zoom in is actually reversed because when we use our array tool it starts at the bottom and works up it works up and to the right so your increments will go up and to the right so if you wanted Garrett to have six pencils and somebody else to have six pencils you can change those rows to another name but no they work bottom up so we'll say Sarah and we'll just say zero I'll drag it down we'll save it actually let's change Tanner too let's go Court we'll drag it down save it browse open it up again so it'll load and let's test there you go so now you can see Garrett work from bottom up and then Sarah where the six at the top now she went bottom up all right so let's set this all so that it looks looks correct so we'll clean this up real quick drag them down save browse load it test it all right let's go back to our our layers and I'm going to want this layer here my black layer this is going to be Phil Phil I want 600 mm/ second and 50% power don't forget you're going to to not output your Green Layer that's right and we're not going to Output the red or green layer so I'm going to make sure both of those are deselected this is where I will save this template as a lightburn file now step four time to make all of our Cuts well not all of our cuts the rest of our cuts and we're going to use the print and cut feature inside lightburn so I'll meet you back over in lightburn Kim is going to do a jig on over here we are back in lightburn now we're going to engrave our words but we're going to use a really super cool and easy tool that even comes with a wizard so there's a little button right here for print and cut and if you don't see it here you can always go up to laser tools and print and cut you can go to your wizard so let's zoom in a little bit all right soz I'm going to want to get to these two registration marks or targets so let's start our Wizard and it's going to ask me to set our first Target position so we're going to think we're going to make this one our first Target so I'm going to select this Target and I'm going to say set now I'm going to go out to the laser and I'm going to line up my Red Dot pointer so it's directly in the center of this target I'm going to try to hit those crosshairs right in the center with my laser head get that red dot dead center now we'll load all of the pencils Into The Jig without moving The Jig I'm going to check it just to make sure it's still dead center now we're going to move the laser head to the center of the other registration marks or the center of the other Target I'm going to jog the machine I'm going to use my arrows on my X and Y AIS to line up that red dot pointer in the center of that second target now if you have to like I have to I bring the speed way down I do 1 mm/ second so I can get it dead center of that Target now back in light bur I'm going to select the second target position here and I'm going to go up here where it says set second target position and now we're just going to click set so now I have two options I have a line outputs scaled this could skew my image or the words so we're going to want no scaling now when it sends the coordinates to the laser it's going to send them using these two as the base so I'm going to select everything here and because these aren't outputs they should be good to go so that's how you create a template I can use this over and over again I'll just simply go in change the names in my spreadsheet come back to lightburn realign my print and cut set my targets and click Start I don't have to change anything on this ever again I'll just simply align my targets and change my spreadsheet super [Music] repeatable step five profit so each penc costs about a dime that's 10 cents and you sell a 12pack for about $12 and to engrave 12 pencils took about 1 minute they are so easy to do they were so fast I really have enjoyed it I've got some funny sayings I'll show more details over on patreon uh where I won't get demonetized for some of them and I can't wait to do more I had some really great ideas for packaging I didn't get a chance to get those printed but my suggestion is and what I'm seeing all over Etsy too uh you can print or even engrave some card stock you just run a little back to school engraving on it or even print on just find something out of canva right a little graphic right on some white card stock and then they're putting all 12 and just wrapping them in washi tape and then we were going to shrink wrap them you can also buy the little cellophane bags and send them in those and they're just a cute little gift that you can give right here before school starts it's just a fun little fun little gift and it's super great profit margin for you it is and we'll get deeper into that CSV merge in lightburn over on patreon and speaking of patreon big thanks to all of our patrons we love you guys and that is the best way to support this channel now if you guys want to see Kim do her jig we can get to that cuz I am about out of time so if you're not going to stick around for Kim's jig we will see you next week where we'll do build it and make it again all right ready is it time to make all your cuts that my jig there you go all right ready now that we have our jig all set wait this isn't this is the pr now that we have our jig we're going to do a jig over to lightburn to make our template do not totally going in I almost didn't do [Music]