The Center: A Prototype Development Story

So hopefully this will slot into here and we should be good so let's try that as our prototype and then she wants this as an earring hanger so I'm not going to put any earring holes in here yet I'm just going to see if this whole thing works and then we'll hold the U the earrings up to it and see what we think and where we want to put them. So I'm going to export export this as an SVG and we're going to use Artboard so it's going to do both of them okay.

As we move forward with our project, we need to ensure that our settings are correct to avoid any issues with fire detection. We're working with cardboard, which can be a problem if not handled properly. The machine we're using has one of the best fire detections available and we want to make sure we're safe while working with this material.

We'll use the X tool S1 for our laser cutting today because of its excellent fire detection features. This will give us an added layer of protection as we work with cardboard. We can also measure thickness and other materials using the machine itself, which is a huge time-saver in our design process.

First, let's add some material to the machine and get a measurement for it. Okay, so this guy fits in here nicely. Now that we have our prototype, we can start making adjustments as needed. The reason I want to do earring holes now is because I wanted to get this thing out first and see exactly where we want to put them.

Let's decide on the placement of the holes. We'll put a line across here, a line across there, and another line across there. This will give us an idea of how far apart we need to space our earring holes. My wife has some very long earrings, so let's make sure our holes are spaced accordingly.

We'll use a guideline to help us place the holes precisely. We can adjust this guideline as needed to ensure that our design is perfect. I noticed on my wife's initial design that there were stars marking where we should put our earring holes. Let's incorporate those into our design and make it even more personalized.

Now, let's get some guides in here just for reference and make sure everything fits together perfectly. We'll copy and paste the other half of the design to complete it, making sure to adjust the thickness for our 3mm Walnut material. Now that we have our design finalized, let's head back down to the laser.

We're now using the X tool S1 with our Walnut in the machine, and we've already measured its thickness. This means we can proceed with confidence, knowing that our settings are correct. It took about 2 minutes for this part of the project to complete.

Once we finished cutting out the design, I took it outside and hit it with a little lacquer to seal it in place. The clear aerosol lacquer provides a satin finish and will protect our design from any damage or wear and tear. After applying a thin coat of lacquer, I let it dry for about half an hour.

Now, take a look at our final project! This is what can happen when you turn an idea into reality. The light might be doing the product justice, but trust me, it's perfect just the way it is.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enso if you've had your laser for any amount of time somebody either a customer or more importantly your wife has come up to you and asked you to make something that you have never made before or don't exactly know how to make today I'm going to teach you how to prototype without using expensive materials to get the result that you want and save you some money along the way let's go what's up guys I'm Nick and this is build dead build a place where we take you seriously seriously today what we're going to be using is something that you should have a lot of around the house especially this time of year it is cardboard so if you're getting any Amazon boxes or whatever you want to save it for this project so we're going to use some material that you normally just throw away or recycle to use for our prototype design my wife has asked me to make her one of these I don't know how to make that so we're going to jump over on the computer we're going to design our own we're going to use our prototyping material to make a prototype and then we're going to going to decide how we want to design the final product so this is a thinner material I have thicker cardboard down in the shop so I'm going to be using that something that's really good when you're doing prototyping is to have a set of calipers that way you can figure out exactly how thick your material is it looks like this is 263 in that's going to come into play while we're making our prototypes we need to know how thick the material is now let's jump over on the computer and get started okay so the first thing I did is I found a bunch of images of Christmas trees online and I sent them to my wife because you want to make sure that the wife approves so out of these she settled on this green one we're going to open up and I'm going to edit in AI you can do this in other editing softwares this is just what I have um let's go ahead and make this go nine and and we want our Christmas tree to be about uh 9 and a or 9 in tall so I'm going to go 9 and a half just for a little a little wiggle room okay and then we're going to grab this guy and we're going to paste it in here and it's huge uh first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to image trace it next I'm going to ungroup it I'm sorry expand it and then we grab this we take it out get rid of this and then all I want is the outline of this so I'm going to give it a a stroke of 0.5 a fill of nothing then we're going to bring this down hold the shift key and bring it in here and you know what I'm going to make my um let's go ahead and make the height nine um um o and it's pretty wide too let's go ahead and add an art board I'm going to make a base for it I'm going to make an ellipse probably about as wide as it like right about there we can go to let's see let's go to 7.5 and then what I want to do is I want to put a slot in the middle of it and this is where your measurement comes in because the slot is going to be 0.2 63 and then let's see how long this is real quick I'm just going to do that and see uh what the width is in that 1.58 let's copy that copy that we're going to delete this the width the width of the stem of the Christmas tree okay and then we grab this and we bring it over here and we're going to put it hopefully in the center we'll put it there grab this Center Center okay so hopefully this will slot into here and we should be good so let's try that as our prototype and then she wants this as an earring hanger so I'm not going to put any earring holes in here yet I'm just going to see if this whole thing works and then we'll hold the U the earrings up to it and see what we think and where we want to put them so I'm going to export export this as an SVG and we're going to use artboard so it's going to do both of them okay and then let's head downstairs to the laser okay and we're down here with the X tool S1 the reason we're using this today is because of the fire detection it probably has one of the best fire detections of a machine out there and we are working with cardboards so the one thing about working with cardboard or any paper products is that fire is a real issue if you don't get your settings correct so we want to make sure that we're safe when we do this so if my settings are a little off and we have happen to start a fire we will know immediately and the Machine will shut down the other bonus of this is since we're just doing a prototype and we don't want to spend all our time measuring material and thing like that we can use the machine itself to measure thickness and uh give us those readings okay so first I'm going to just put this on the material and we'll get a measurement for that okay we're going to give it a frame all right here we go all right so this guy's going to fit in here and so that's so we need to play with that a little bit but that's kind of what we're looking at now that we have our prototype we can and the reason I want to do the earring holes is because I wanted to get this thing out here first and see exactly where we want to put these so I'm thinking like a line across here a line across here a line across here and these guys are my my longest earrings or my wife's longest earrings and probably what do you think about an inch apart they can hang in there so probably right probably right in there yeah that'll work back to the computer okay so here we are and we decided that we were going to grab a guideline here and bring it down to the tip just the tip right ladies and gentlemen and it looks like this is a little off so we're going to kind of split the difference there and then I'm going to use this uh star tool and make a little star I noticed on the design that my wife had sent me initially that it had these stars as the places to put your earring through so I thought that'd be kind of cool thing to use let's get some guides in here just to just to get an idea of where we're going to put stuff I'm going to put one there looks like we'll probably just have actually we could maybe put four up at the top okay all right there is a star it just doesn't have a stroke let's give it a stroke all right we're just going to put that guy right there and then what we're going to do is we're g to just copy and paste the other thing you want to do is make sure to adjust adjust this to the right thickness for your stock so now we're using 3mm Walnut and so now like the thickness of this is going to be different 0.118 okay let's head back down to the laser so we have our Walnut in the machine we have already measured the thickness of the material and now we're just going to go ahead and do our thing all right and run time on that was about 2 minutes this guy out so this guy slides in here oops ni slides in here and there we have it we've got our nice little earring holder looks like a Christmas tree the wife wanted this for her Christmas earrings so I think I think it's going to work just fine use a little bit of this thick CA glue by starbon cuz it kind of fills gaps and we're just going to run a little bead around the bottom on both sides I'm going to push it in so I just took that outside and hit it with a little lacquer this is the stuff I use Minwax clear aerosol lacquer uh this is satin finish and we're going to let that dry for about a half hour and just like that you can take an idea and turn it into a final project check that out I don't know if the light is doing it justice computer turn light on there you go you probably see it a little bit better now but that's final project little coat of lacquer on there and uh and there you go now you know how to prototype no excuses got to go whoso if you've had your laser for any amount of time somebody either a customer or more importantly your wife has come up to you and asked you to make something that you have never made before or don't exactly know how to make today I'm going to teach you how to prototype without using expensive materials to get the result that you want and save you some money along the way let's go what's up guys I'm Nick and this is build dead build a place where we take you seriously seriously today what we're going to be using is something that you should have a lot of around the house especially this time of year it is cardboard so if you're getting any Amazon boxes or whatever you want to save it for this project so we're going to use some material that you normally just throw away or recycle to use for our prototype design my wife has asked me to make her one of these I don't know how to make that so we're going to jump over on the computer we're going to design our own we're going to use our prototyping material to make a prototype and then we're going to going to decide how we want to design the final product so this is a thinner material I have thicker cardboard down in the shop so I'm going to be using that something that's really good when you're doing prototyping is to have a set of calipers that way you can figure out exactly how thick your material is it looks like this is 263 in that's going to come into play while we're making our prototypes we need to know how thick the material is now let's jump over on the computer and get started okay so the first thing I did is I found a bunch of images of Christmas trees online and I sent them to my wife because you want to make sure that the wife approves so out of these she settled on this green one we're going to open up and I'm going to edit in AI you can do this in other editing softwares this is just what I have um let's go ahead and make this go nine and and we want our Christmas tree to be about uh 9 and a or 9 in tall so I'm going to go 9 and a half just for a little a little wiggle room okay and then we're going to grab this guy and we're going to paste it in here and it's huge uh first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to image trace it next I'm going to ungroup it I'm sorry expand it and then we grab this we take it out get rid of this and then all I want is the outline of this so I'm going to give it a a stroke of 0.5 a fill of nothing then we're going to bring this down hold the shift key and bring it in here and you know what I'm going to make my um let's go ahead and make the height nine um um o and it's pretty wide too let's go ahead and add an art board I'm going to make a base for it I'm going to make an ellipse probably about as wide as it like right about there we can go to let's see let's go to 7.5 and then what I want to do is I want to put a slot in the middle of it and this is where your measurement comes in because the slot is going to be 0.2 63 and then let's see how long this is real quick I'm just going to do that and see uh what the width is in that 1.58 let's copy that copy that we're going to delete this the width the width of the stem of the Christmas tree okay and then we grab this and we bring it over here and we're going to put it hopefully in the center we'll put it there grab this Center Center okay so hopefully this will slot into here and we should be good so let's try that as our prototype and then she wants this as an earring hanger so I'm not going to put any earring holes in here yet I'm just going to see if this whole thing works and then we'll hold the U the earrings up to it and see what we think and where we want to put them so I'm going to export export this as an SVG and we're going to use artboard so it's going to do both of them okay and then let's head downstairs to the laser okay and we're down here with the X tool S1 the reason we're using this today is because of the fire detection it probably has one of the best fire detections of a machine out there and we are working with cardboards so the one thing about working with cardboard or any paper products is that fire is a real issue if you don't get your settings correct so we want to make sure that we're safe when we do this so if my settings are a little off and we have happen to start a fire we will know immediately and the Machine will shut down the other bonus of this is since we're just doing a prototype and we don't want to spend all our time measuring material and thing like that we can use the machine itself to measure thickness and uh give us those readings okay so first I'm going to just put this on the material and we'll get a measurement for that okay we're going to give it a frame all right here we go all right so this guy's going to fit in here and so that's so we need to play with that a little bit but that's kind of what we're looking at now that we have our prototype we can and the reason I want to do the earring holes is because I wanted to get this thing out here first and see exactly where we want to put these so I'm thinking like a line across here a line across here a line across here and these guys are my my longest earrings or my wife's longest earrings and probably what do you think about an inch apart they can hang in there so probably right probably right in there yeah that'll work back to the computer okay so here we are and we decided that we were going to grab a guideline here and bring it down to the tip just the tip right ladies and gentlemen and it looks like this is a little off so we're going to kind of split the difference there and then I'm going to use this uh star tool and make a little star I noticed on the design that my wife had sent me initially that it had these stars as the places to put your earring through so I thought that'd be kind of cool thing to use let's get some guides in here just to just to get an idea of where we're going to put stuff I'm going to put one there looks like we'll probably just have actually we could maybe put four up at the top okay all right there is a star it just doesn't have a stroke let's give it a stroke all right we're just going to put that guy right there and then what we're going to do is we're g to just copy and paste the other thing you want to do is make sure to adjust adjust this to the right thickness for your stock so now we're using 3mm Walnut and so now like the thickness of this is going to be different 0.118 okay let's head back down to the laser so we have our Walnut in the machine we have already measured the thickness of the material and now we're just going to go ahead and do our thing all right and run time on that was about 2 minutes this guy out so this guy slides in here oops ni slides in here and there we have it we've got our nice little earring holder looks like a Christmas tree the wife wanted this for her Christmas earrings so I think I think it's going to work just fine use a little bit of this thick CA glue by starbon cuz it kind of fills gaps and we're just going to run a little bead around the bottom on both sides I'm going to push it in so I just took that outside and hit it with a little lacquer this is the stuff I use Minwax clear aerosol lacquer uh this is satin finish and we're going to let that dry for about a half hour and just like that you can take an idea and turn it into a final project check that out I don't know if the light is doing it justice computer turn light on there you go you probably see it a little bit better now but that's final project little coat of lacquer on there and uh and there you go now you know how to prototype no excuses got to go who\n"