get more from your laser by going out of focus what's up i'm jonathan and welcome
to maker tales where i'm sharing my maker journey to help you go further in yours
so don't forget to subscribe and hit that little bell icon to never miss an opportunity to keep
making this video is all about focusing onto kiss cutting also known as scoring but more importantly
is how to take it to the next level because most scoring or kiss cutting
is done with just one line width however what if i told you by just unfocusing your laser you
can get different lined widths on the same job additionally depending on the speed of your laser
scoring can be much faster of course it is very dependent on the artwork so for instance with me
which i have quite a slow engraving laser which is the glowforge i can do something like this
size but it would take me around three hours but with kiss cutting this only took me 20 minutes
having said that i will be focusing mainly on glowforge users here but i will be giving all the
information needed so you can do this on any laser cutter because i have done this on a wide range
of other laser cutting machines and the steps are practically the same so to start with what we need
to do is a kiss cutting guide now i'm not going to be showing you how to get the kiss cutting
settings because quite frankly you just get the cut settings of your material and you put down the
power it's as simple as that you're trying to just kiss cut the top of the material to leave a mark
or a score line now when it comes to the kiss cutting guide we've got to keep some things in
mind what this is is no offset from the material or from the bed it depends how you want to do this
i like to do this from the bed and then go upwards and then from there i'm able to just take it away
more than anything that's because of my glowforge but i will explain this now so this material is
three millimeters so you'll see that if we go to here all these first ones are exactly the
same then between three and six they increase in size and because this is a glow forge i can only
go up to six millimeter thick material so from six millimeters onwards the line thickness stays
the same however if your laser can take a much thicker material with a moving bed or something
along those lines or where you're able to manually focus it you'll also see that you'll be able to
set up a manual focus point move down the bed so you can change the z-axis of your bed which is
also the equivalent of unfocusing your laser the longest sorry the widest i've been able to get
a kiss cut line is about a centimeter now you've got to be very careful with that because at that
point you're gonna still have to increase the power and it'll be a specific setting
for that amount of offset so feel free to download this file it's down in the description and of
course i want to show you how i set this up for my glowforge and i know for those that don't have
a glow forge you'll see that it's pretty much the same steps you might have to do a little googling
to find out how to do your z offset or your lens defocusing for your specific machine but let's
go and show you how i've done mine so this here is the testing file that i have to see all the
widths that i have available on each material that i use of course this is going to be different for
a material such as paper that will literally be a difference as soon as i go up to one to a material
that starts at three millimeters high and then technically that's one millimeter offset two and
three millimeters of offset so as it's already set up let me just show you quickly so this one
the top one is just an engraving then i've ordered all of these so it just goes along this
now i already have a sitting which is my birch kiss cut and of course this is zero so it has no
offset at all however then we go here to the first one you'll see i have this set to one millimeter
then i've got the set here to two three four five six and so on now obviously if you're not using a
glowforge this is going to be completely different and you're going to have to look for something
called a z offset or a focal offset i'm pretty sure you'll be able to find this within your
laser cutting operation or software the key aspect here is all of these are their own colors as you
have it in the download as is to set the z height or the focus length to each one so that you can
then be informed by your little test here once you have your offset or defocusing little chart
here you'll be able to see the type of results that you've been getting so for me because i'm
on the glow forge you'll see that this here up to three it doesn't change that's because the
glow forge does all its calculations from the bed upwards so if i were to actually lower this down
to the bed level i would have a much greater range of lines to choose from now once you have a range
of lines to choose from here's where you can get artistic and really start to create things as you
want them with thin lines and thick lines all in one pass so for instance i've done this with this
contouring of a map i will have another video that will be linked down in the description that i'll
be making that i'll show you how to make this both in blender and out of blender and now by using our
little chart that we've just got there i know the settings that i'm going to be using within my
contour lines so as you see i've got three things here i have my fine lines my thick lines and
my outside cut my fine lines are going to be done right here with the automatic focus point
so zero offset and then my larger lines are going to be at my maximum offset which is
at six millimeters and then i just have a normal cutting right there so now with this cutting
of course i've kept this very simple this only has two different lines which is the default line
and my thickest line but you can get a lot more complicated and this here is the end result as
you can see it's very obvious the thin and thick lines which are the contour references for the map
additionally with this mandala here you can see that i've done both thick and thin lines all in
one pass and what's something really interesting that you can do is if you put a whole bunch of
thick lines together it turns out to a type of engraving in fact if you really wanted you can
measure how thick your new kiss cut line is and then create kiss cut engraving so
manually setting up an engraving path i've got another future video where i'll be showing you
some really cool things that you can do when you take that to its full potential and with that
all said it's that easy to unlock your new super power which is defocused or offset kiss cut lines
i really do mean it that you're gonna find a whole bunch of uses for this because it is so much
quicker than engraving i know that for me it was a game changer when i really took it into practice
now a huge thank you to my patrons you guys are awesome and it means the world to me and if you're
enjoying what i'm making here and think i'm worthy of your support i would love to see you there too
don't forget that we have a discord it's down in the description feel free to join
it and show me what you're making thanks for watching keep making and let the quest continue