Laser Engravable Plastic (Making Keychains on the Muse Core)

**Designing and Engraving a Custom Keychain**

The process of designing and engraving a custom keychain began with selecting an image to work with. The chosen image was of Lake of the Ozarks, Osage Beach, Missouri, which would become the inspiration for the design. The goal was to center the image on the keychain.

**Mocking Up the Design**

Using a font and text tool, the original image was modified to fit the desired layout. However, the chosen font was not satisfactory, so it was replaced with a new one. This new font was used to create the welcome message "Welcome to Lake of the Ozarks" for the back of the keychain.

**Preparing for Engraving**

Before proceeding with engraving, the design settings were established. For the raster engrave, 500 dpi, 30 power, and 100 speed were chosen, while the vector engrave would use 50 speed, 75 power. These settings would ensure a precise and accurate engraving process.

**Engraving Process**

The engraving process involved using Starbond ca glue to secure the keychain in place. Once set, the glue was sanded down with 220-grit sandpaper to remove any excess or imperfections. The final touch was adding a simple ring and either a twisty ring or a clasp for added functionality.

**Final Product and Thanks**

The finished keychain featured the welcome message "Welcome to Lake of the Ozarks" on the back, surrounded by the original image. The engraving process showcased attention to detail and precision. A special thanks was extended to all patrons who supported the creator, including those who contributed to the channel through subscriptions and patronage.

**Personal Note from the Creator**

The creator of the keychain took a moment to express their appreciation for the community's support. They looked forward to visiting Lake of the Ozarks soon, where they would enjoy the beauty of nature and perhaps even create more custom designs inspired by the region.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwhat's up guys i'm nick and this is bill dead build a place where we believe that the key to everyone's heart is black tar heroine i mean chocolate so we're going on like three weeks of nick having this frog in his throat so bear with me that's right guys we're back with another video i'm filming upstairs in the office because it is incredibly hot in the shop right now but we will be working on the muse core today we'll be working on the co2 laser uh in in the air conditioning kids in the air conditioning no pleasure no rapture no exquisite sin greater than central air so i've been doing some browsing on etsy lately looking for some new products to come up with and publish in the shop and i found kind of a little niche of uh retro keychains that that appears to be like kind of a big deal now you remember the old-school key rings the ones with that had an actual key on it when you went to like a motel and then they had little plastic things so you didn't take off with or forget that it was theirs for whatever reason so keychains like these remember these well apparently they're back baby um and just i guess the kind of retro thing is is the deal because obviously we don't use hotel keys anymore i go out of my way to not have any keys but i guess some people still have keys so the ones i've seen like say have a nice day and like that on them i wanted to do some more kind of like pop culture themed ones if you know you know this is a hotel key for l for ozark the netflix original this is jonah's room if you want to stop me you're gonna have to um i mean i think everybody would know the bates motel the rosebud motel is a little shit's creek ew david and then i did this one on walnut uh for camp crystal lake the issue i had was material it everything worked fine for the camp crystal lake one because the walnut and the wood just made sense but the other ones i tried them on acrylic and they just didn't have that pop i tried to mask them and then spray paint them but some of the detail was so small that it didn't really translate through so i reached out to my buddy ryan at enduramark and he hooked me up with this this is engravable plastic this is designed to be cut and engraved by your laser and as you can see this one's green it has a white backing so when you engrave it it comes out white and when you cut it it makes holes in it and the beauty of this stuff is it comes in a ton of different colors so you've got black on white red on white you get the idea blue doesn't do so well on uh diode laser because of the color of the beam but then you get into things like gold on black silver on black white on red i don't know if you can tell but that's white on blue oh yeah that looks blue around there but a ton of different colors and before i see this in the comments we're doing this on the co2 because the d1 did have a little bit of a problem getting clean edges so if you look real close you see how that's it's it cut through but it's kind of jaggedy this one down here is a little bit better but i think there was like multiple passes like five or six passes maybe so this is kind of doable with the diode laser but you're gonna have to tweak some settings and you may have to do a little sanding on the edges so i've not touched this with the d1 20 watt laser yet so you may get better cuts on the 20 watt but today we're going to be using the muse it'll be a little quicker a little cleaner let's do this so just to make this a little simpler i'm going to do this in illustrator so basically we're going to come in and we're just going to make a 2x6 canvas i'm going to put my rulers in i'm going to bring this down to halfway so three inches oops here it is to halfway which is one inch okay and then i'm just gonna grab my pen tool and the biggest thing here is you wanna look for that intersect to come up and we're going to make this funky looking diamond okay and once that's done i'm going to punch up a stroke on it get over here select it and then we're going to grab our direct select tool which is the white one and we're going to grab this little ball right here so if you haven't done this already you want to go to window you want to pull this down to transform and pull up your transform window and make sure to say scale corners if that's not checked this won't work right all right so then we're just going to grab this little ball and we're going to pull it down and basically here let's put another line in here we just want to get this down to one inch because then that's going to be that's going to make this two inches here two inches here so our keychain will be four inches which is what we're looking for we're just going to continue to pull this down until we get to 4 inches and then if you look here what do you know okay so the next thing we're going to do is we're going to come in here and we're going to draw some lines make sure the shape is unselected we're going to come in here and grab the pen tool and we're just going to draw some lines across this so just draw a line until it says intersect and then hit escape now you can do this however you want and then you just do the same thing at the bottom it just uh adds a nice little detail i've got this the way i like it so i'm sure there's an easier way to do this but i don't know how so what i'm going to do is i'm going to come in here and grab these two lines and i'm just going to remove them and then i'm going to come over here and i'm going to make myself a circle like make sure that i'm dead center and then we'll align it to here real quick just to make sure okay now i'm going to recreate those two lines by coming in here and drawing 2 here and then hitting escape coming over here drawn over this way i can draw around that circle i know there's got to be a way to punch that out but honestly i just don't know what it is and then of course we're going to come in here and clean it up a little bit okay next we're going to google images and we're going to type in lazy oh motel keychain so we'll find a good picture of one let's back this up and go ozark i'm going to copy that image i'm going to bring it in here to adobe illustrator i'm going to drop it in here and then we are going to image trace this and we're going to image trace it by default because i don't need any other information right all i want is this stuff right here so i'm going to come in here to my direct select tool so first off i'm just going to delete all this stuff around here and you get the idea we're just going to clean this up so give me a sec let me clean this up okay now we're going to come in here we're going to grab this guy and we look pretty clean right so we're going to do is just change the fill from white to black and basically i want the lazy o to be as big as possible right so we're going to tweak it around until we can get it to a spot where it's very noticeable but it's not you know it's not going outside the frame at all so probably right about there next we need to recreate the lettering inside this i'm going to come over here i'm going to type out motel and i want something fairly bold because these are going to be small ladders and then the next thing i'm going to do is i'm going to grab this i'm going to bring this over here and it's going to extend along here i think we're looking at probably like 300 or something like that where it's like the big thing is what i'm looking for now is where this y comes down has to come in between the m and the o okay so now we're going to change the fill color to the of this to white and take it up here put it in there it looks like it's a little big i'll drop it down move it up now it looks like we need to possibly uh make this even bigger 750 perfect well kind of perfect now my concern is the way this comes down that l is going to be weird so we're just going to push into here again we're going to grab our direct select we're going to look for we're going to look for the anchors here pull this down a little bit and then we're just going to pull this down a little bit and apparently pull this down a little bit and just give us a little bit of line there on the bottom okay next stop is our room number we are going to do an ellipse tool draw a circle 0.75 all right and then we want to turn our fill off give it a stroke of probably probably one i'm gonna grab this bring it up here and then we're gonna center it to the rest of our design so we're gonna use this and we're going to center object we'll put our number in there uh jonas number in this in the show is i'm going to do 138 i want to do a little bit of a different font here uh kind of probably more of a roundy font per se i guess just to kind of give it more of that feel of a room number so just a little bit more of a comic sans without actually using comic sans and then i'm going to grab this and bring this over here and then we just want to center that in the circle by selecting both the number and the circle and using the center tool all right so everything else is just details right so i'm going to come in here and i am going to say lake of the ozarks osage beach missouri i'm going to take this i'm going to make it centered i'm going to reduce it down so it'll fit oh wrong way reduce down so it'll fit i actually like this font a little bit better um than the original one but i already have this mocked up in red and engraved three as well so let's hop over to retin engrave three and we'll take a look at where we go from here okay so now that i've brought the keychain image into retina and grave 3 i just wanted to go over kind of what i did after the fact so let's um let's grab this i copy it i'm going to move it to a new project so i imported this in and then i use the tracing tool to trace the outside only then i use the ellipse tool to make a circle about the size of the other one so those are going to be my vector cuts but then what i did is i took those two and i copied them again and that became the back of the key chain and then in written engrave three i decided that i wanted to put welcome to lake of the ozarks on the back of the keychain so i grabbed my text tool and i said welcome to lake of the ozarks oops those arcs and i wasn't crazy about that font so i went through here until i found kind of uh what i thought was like a more funky font this is not the one i originally used but just for argument's sake i went ahead and filled it and aligned it center and then i grab my direct select tool or i go grab my select tool and spun it and then i just change the size until i had the size i thought i wanted so 36 is too big 24 is too small like 28 and grab this and put it in the center and then i just grab the outside of this and center center and we're ready to go okay now let's jump back to the original okay so now we have the front back of our keychain and the settings we're going to be using for this are as follows one we have to raster this so for the engrave we're going to be going 500 dpi 30 power 100 speed 125 threshold um the threshold on this isn't going to matter as much this is just going to be 500 by 500 and this is going to be 30. our vector engrave is going to be 50 speed 75 power and this smells exactly as you would expect it to grab these okay and next we're down in the shop what we're gonna do is just a little ca glue just by starbond i'm going to take this i don't use activator with this because what i want to do is i want to put this on and i want to make sure that my holes line up because guys you know you always want your holes to line up and then i just clamp it with one of these guys i'm going to let that sit for a minute okay once those have sat for about 15 minutes i go and pop them out and then all i'm going to do is i'm going with a little 220 sandpaper on the edges just to make just to kind of knock down if there is any little seam just any little variants on it let me do that like so and last they get the ring itself and i like to use i'll link to what i use down below uh i do one of these simple rings but i also like to put on one of these clasps because i think that these are a little bit more functional than just having that the twisty ring um i just think it makes it look a little bit better so then you're looking at final product right there little lazio welcome to lake of the ozarks i want to say thanks for sticking around till this time in the video uh if you haven't subscribed to the channel please consider hitting that subscribe button it just really helps me out i want to say a special thanks to all of my patrons these guys are the bee's knees i'm losing my voice especially my top tier or boilermaker patrons stephen mann eric weiss derek coates chuck faulkner puffy muffins andy the viking christopher walters todd stewart paul christensen and jason ayers clinkies special single shout out goes to our newest patron marlon doust double clinkies all right guys what do you think do you likey would you buy e do you think you should sell e let me know in the comments down below now thanks for playing now i gotta get to the ozarks so i've been doing why is it that light suck no idea what shot over the ceiling or something i don't know what that iswhat's up guys i'm nick and this is bill dead build a place where we believe that the key to everyone's heart is black tar heroine i mean chocolate so we're going on like three weeks of nick having this frog in his throat so bear with me that's right guys we're back with another video i'm filming upstairs in the office because it is incredibly hot in the shop right now but we will be working on the muse core today we'll be working on the co2 laser uh in in the air conditioning kids in the air conditioning no pleasure no rapture no exquisite sin greater than central air so i've been doing some browsing on etsy lately looking for some new products to come up with and publish in the shop and i found kind of a little niche of uh retro keychains that that appears to be like kind of a big deal now you remember the old-school key rings the ones with that had an actual key on it when you went to like a motel and then they had little plastic things so you didn't take off with or forget that it was theirs for whatever reason so keychains like these remember these well apparently they're back baby um and just i guess the kind of retro thing is is the deal because obviously we don't use hotel keys anymore i go out of my way to not have any keys but i guess some people still have keys so the ones i've seen like say have a nice day and like that on them i wanted to do some more kind of like pop culture themed ones if you know you know this is a hotel key for l for ozark the netflix original this is jonah's room if you want to stop me you're gonna have to um i mean i think everybody would know the bates motel the rosebud motel is a little shit's creek ew david and then i did this one on walnut uh for camp crystal lake the issue i had was material it everything worked fine for the camp crystal lake one because the walnut and the wood just made sense but the other ones i tried them on acrylic and they just didn't have that pop i tried to mask them and then spray paint them but some of the detail was so small that it didn't really translate through so i reached out to my buddy ryan at enduramark and he hooked me up with this this is engravable plastic this is designed to be cut and engraved by your laser and as you can see this one's green it has a white backing so when you engrave it it comes out white and when you cut it it makes holes in it and the beauty of this stuff is it comes in a ton of different colors so you've got black on white red on white you get the idea blue doesn't do so well on uh diode laser because of the color of the beam but then you get into things like gold on black silver on black white on red i don't know if you can tell but that's white on blue oh yeah that looks blue around there but a ton of different colors and before i see this in the comments we're doing this on the co2 because the d1 did have a little bit of a problem getting clean edges so if you look real close you see how that's it's it cut through but it's kind of jaggedy this one down here is a little bit better but i think there was like multiple passes like five or six passes maybe so this is kind of doable with the diode laser but you're gonna have to tweak some settings and you may have to do a little sanding on the edges so i've not touched this with the d1 20 watt laser yet so you may get better cuts on the 20 watt but today we're going to be using the muse it'll be a little quicker a little cleaner let's do this so just to make this a little simpler i'm going to do this in illustrator so basically we're going to come in and we're just going to make a 2x6 canvas i'm going to put my rulers in i'm going to bring this down to halfway so three inches oops here it is to halfway which is one inch okay and then i'm just gonna grab my pen tool and the biggest thing here is you wanna look for that intersect to come up and we're going to make this funky looking diamond okay and once that's done i'm going to punch up a stroke on it get over here select it and then we're going to grab our direct select tool which is the white one and we're going to grab this little ball right here so if you haven't done this already you want to go to window you want to pull this down to transform and pull up your transform window and make sure to say scale corners if that's not checked this won't work right all right so then we're just going to grab this little ball and we're going to pull it down and basically here let's put another line in here we just want to get this down to one inch because then that's going to be that's going to make this two inches here two inches here so our keychain will be four inches which is what we're looking for we're just going to continue to pull this down until we get to 4 inches and then if you look here what do you know okay so the next thing we're going to do is we're going to come in here and we're going to draw some lines make sure the shape is unselected we're going to come in here and grab the pen tool and we're just going to draw some lines across this so just draw a line until it says intersect and then hit escape now you can do this however you want and then you just do the same thing at the bottom it just uh adds a nice little detail i've got this the way i like it so i'm sure there's an easier way to do this but i don't know how so what i'm going to do is i'm going to come in here and grab these two lines and i'm just going to remove them and then i'm going to come over here and i'm going to make myself a circle like make sure that i'm dead center and then we'll align it to here real quick just to make sure okay now i'm going to recreate those two lines by coming in here and drawing 2 here and then hitting escape coming over here drawn over this way i can draw around that circle i know there's got to be a way to punch that out but honestly i just don't know what it is and then of course we're going to come in here and clean it up a little bit okay next we're going to google images and we're going to type in lazy oh motel keychain so we'll find a good picture of one let's back this up and go ozark i'm going to copy that image i'm going to bring it in here to adobe illustrator i'm going to drop it in here and then we are going to image trace this and we're going to image trace it by default because i don't need any other information right all i want is this stuff right here so i'm going to come in here to my direct select tool so first off i'm just going to delete all this stuff around here and you get the idea we're just going to clean this up so give me a sec let me clean this up okay now we're going to come in here we're going to grab this guy and we look pretty clean right so we're going to do is just change the fill from white to black and basically i want the lazy o to be as big as possible right so we're going to tweak it around until we can get it to a spot where it's very noticeable but it's not you know it's not going outside the frame at all so probably right about there next we need to recreate the lettering inside this i'm going to come over here i'm going to type out motel and i want something fairly bold because these are going to be small ladders and then the next thing i'm going to do is i'm going to grab this i'm going to bring this over here and it's going to extend along here i think we're looking at probably like 300 or something like that where it's like the big thing is what i'm looking for now is where this y comes down has to come in between the m and the o okay so now we're going to change the fill color to the of this to white and take it up here put it in there it looks like it's a little big i'll drop it down move it up now it looks like we need to possibly uh make this even bigger 750 perfect well kind of perfect now my concern is the way this comes down that l is going to be weird so we're just going to push into here again we're going to grab our direct select we're going to look for we're going to look for the anchors here pull this down a little bit and then we're just going to pull this down a little bit and apparently pull this down a little bit and just give us a little bit of line there on the bottom okay next stop is our room number we are going to do an ellipse tool draw a circle 0.75 all right and then we want to turn our fill off give it a stroke of probably probably one i'm gonna grab this bring it up here and then we're gonna center it to the rest of our design so we're gonna use this and we're going to center object we'll put our number in there uh jonas number in this in the show is i'm going to do 138 i want to do a little bit of a different font here uh kind of probably more of a roundy font per se i guess just to kind of give it more of that feel of a room number so just a little bit more of a comic sans without actually using comic sans and then i'm going to grab this and bring this over here and then we just want to center that in the circle by selecting both the number and the circle and using the center tool all right so everything else is just details right so i'm going to come in here and i am going to say lake of the ozarks osage beach missouri i'm going to take this i'm going to make it centered i'm going to reduce it down so it'll fit oh wrong way reduce down so it'll fit i actually like this font a little bit better um than the original one but i already have this mocked up in red and engraved three as well so let's hop over to retin engrave three and we'll take a look at where we go from here okay so now that i've brought the keychain image into retina and grave 3 i just wanted to go over kind of what i did after the fact so let's um let's grab this i copy it i'm going to move it to a new project so i imported this in and then i use the tracing tool to trace the outside only then i use the ellipse tool to make a circle about the size of the other one so those are going to be my vector cuts but then what i did is i took those two and i copied them again and that became the back of the key chain and then in written engrave three i decided that i wanted to put welcome to lake of the ozarks on the back of the keychain so i grabbed my text tool and i said welcome to lake of the ozarks oops those arcs and i wasn't crazy about that font so i went through here until i found kind of uh what i thought was like a more funky font this is not the one i originally used but just for argument's sake i went ahead and filled it and aligned it center and then i grab my direct select tool or i go grab my select tool and spun it and then i just change the size until i had the size i thought i wanted so 36 is too big 24 is too small like 28 and grab this and put it in the center and then i just grab the outside of this and center center and we're ready to go okay now let's jump back to the original okay so now we have the front back of our keychain and the settings we're going to be using for this are as follows one we have to raster this so for the engrave we're going to be going 500 dpi 30 power 100 speed 125 threshold um the threshold on this isn't going to matter as much this is just going to be 500 by 500 and this is going to be 30. our vector engrave is going to be 50 speed 75 power and this smells exactly as you would expect it to grab these okay and next we're down in the shop what we're gonna do is just a little ca glue just by starbond i'm going to take this i don't use activator with this because what i want to do is i want to put this on and i want to make sure that my holes line up because guys you know you always want your holes to line up and then i just clamp it with one of these guys i'm going to let that sit for a minute okay once those have sat for about 15 minutes i go and pop them out and then all i'm going to do is i'm going with a little 220 sandpaper on the edges just to make just to kind of knock down if there is any little seam just any little variants on it let me do that like so and last they get the ring itself and i like to use i'll link to what i use down below uh i do one of these simple rings but i also like to put on one of these clasps because i think that these are a little bit more functional than just having that the twisty ring um i just think it makes it look a little bit better so then you're looking at final product right there little lazio welcome to lake of the ozarks i want to say thanks for sticking around till this time in the video uh if you haven't subscribed to the channel please consider hitting that subscribe button it just really helps me out i want to say a special thanks to all of my patrons these guys are the bee's knees i'm losing my voice especially my top tier or boilermaker patrons stephen mann eric weiss derek coates chuck faulkner puffy muffins andy the viking christopher walters todd stewart paul christensen and jason ayers clinkies special single shout out goes to our newest patron marlon doust double clinkies all right guys what do you think do you likey would you buy e do you think you should sell e let me know in the comments down below now thanks for playing now i gotta get to the ozarks so i've been doing why is it that light suck no idea what shot over the ceiling or something i don't know what that is\n"