Passthrough Slot with the Glowforge

1. Introduction: ~Hey, Skillshare. Today in this class, we're going to be making a welcome sign using the nifty Glowforge laser printer. In addition, I have $500 affiliate link that you guys can click to get a discount on a Glowforge if you're interested in finding one of your own. I'm going to go ahead and show you how to set your files, and let's go ahead and get started. 2. Class Project: Hey friends, welcome to the She Shed. I'm Rose Sprinkle. I teach a bunch of online classes about many different things, but I have 18 years doing graphic design, interior design, and staging. I'm a children's book author. I worked for Amazon. Obviously, I just love to play and learn. Today, I'm going to be teaching you guys about the Glowforge laser printer, specifically, how to use the passthrough slot. With the passthrough slot, you can create large-format cuts or engravings for larger-pieced of items. Me and my husband barely just got married and we're super excited, and for my reception, this became super handy and helpful because I was able to create awesome signs like this one. If you're looking to create like a Mr. and Mrs. sign or a welcome sign or really anything of that nature, the passthrough slot is an awesome way to go. At our wedding, not only did we do large format signs, but I also used it to make our cake topper, all of our food cards, and all of our placeholder names for everyone at their table in addition to some custom journal gifts for my bridesmaids. It was a huge game changer and I absolutely love having this on hand. It's amazing. 3. Materials: For our materials that we're using, I just went to Home Depot and got an 1/8 of an inch underlayment, this nice little board that I saw. You just want to make sure that it's Glowforge approved or that you can actually cut it with a Glowforge, but this cuts just fine. I just have them cut it down to size so that it can fit through the pass-through slot. You can't have anything that's over 20 inches or so or even like 19.5, I think. I'll verify those measurements, but it needs to be wide enough so that it can fit through the slot. Then length, it doesn't matter how long it is. It's a pretty long board. Let's see how this baby cuts. 4. Prepping Files: Now I'm going to show you how to set up your files to be able to use into the Glowforge. I've opened up Illustrator here, but you can also use Procreate or any other program that you like where you can get a vector. But essentially I was going to hit T for my type tool. I'm going to click on my Artboard. It's always already selected the font that I want, I really liked this Alessandro Regular. I don't even know if I'm saying that right, but I love it because it just has a nice curve to it. I'm going to go ahead and scale this up. I'm just going to drag it. You can do it this way or you can go into your transform tool up here, if you know the height and width of what you're doing, but I just going to do it manually just for now because it's a little bit easier. I've already set up my Artboard to the dimensions that I want it to based on my material. I've already set up the Artboard that I want based on the size of my material. My board at max is about 16 wide, so I want to make sure that I'm keeping my lettering at least under that. Then the length doesn't matter as much, because with the Passthrough you can go as long as you need to, horizontally wise. I'm going to reselect this. I'm going to size it up to a point where I feel like it's good, and then I'm going to double click "Select all". I'm going to type in welcome. The important thing to know when you're doing signs like this is you want to make sure that all your letters are connected to each other, because essentially we're cutting the outline on the outside. I'm going to take my type tool and I'm simply going to press option. This is going to help me deal with my kerning in-between each letter, and I'm going to pull it so that it intersects with the W. You can either go here or you can go here. I like to look at that a little bit better, so I'm just going to attach it to the W and make sure that everything else is connected, which is part of why I really like this font. Whatever font you use, just make sure that all of your letters, if it's cursive, are connected or you don't have to manually change it. It may look weird on the screen, but once you actually put it into the Glowforge and print it out, it actually looks really nice and you wouldn't even probably notice the difference. Now that we've typed it out, we need to create outlines. I'm going to say "Shift Apple O". That means that it's now created shapes with all of this, but what we also need to do is go to our Pathfinder. The Pathfinder and I'm going to do unite. That way now the only thing that's showing is this outside line, which is really nice. That's the difference. Now that we got our type size correctly, I'm just going to go above there, we're ready to go. To pull it into the Glowforge software, I'm just going to save this file as an SVG. I'll save it as Passthrough, just say yes. I'm going to replace it so you do this and say "Okay". Then it's time to pull it into the Glowforge software. I just use Chrome, and as you can see, I have all my files already uploaded. I'm going to hit "Upload", then I'm simply going to upload the file that we suggested that it was, which is the Passthrough, hit "Open". Then it's simply going to open it in the thing. It looks crazy at first because we need to do a couple of things. Now it's time to go ahead and turn on our Glowforge and load our material. Then we'll come back here and place it so it's on our board properly. 5. Prepping Glowforge: First thing we need to do is turn our Glowforge on. Then I have the infinity fan instead of the internal Glowforge fan. I'll talk a little bit about this, but then I need to turn this on. Simply [NOISE] I'm going to have to cycle through. You can hear the Glowforge turning on. Now that's on. You'll hear it come on. It's just a more powerful fan than the internal Glowforge one. It does a better job of cycling through all the fumes. In the back of the Glowforge, you have your exhaust fan right here. [NOISE] This is a four-inch, I don't know what this is called [LAUGHTER], but a four-inch tube essentially. Then I have it connected to a modifier that fits an infinity six-inch fan. You can go as large as eight inches, but I think that this one works really well. I'll put the links in the discussion panels to get. Then I just got some heat resistant tape to seal any leakage of air or any fumes on both sides. Then I didn't need an adapter on this side. I wanted to leave a bigger hose so that way there was more power being pumped all of the exhaust out. This is actually, I believe a six-inch hose and that goes out through my window. This fan was a game changer and it runs a lot quieter than when I had it just with the original Glowforge hose. I will put all the links in the resources below so you guys know what materials to look for when you're trying to set up your Glowforge. If you don't want to do it this manually, if you don't have a window that you can pump out your fumes through, Glowforge sells its own system that you can just plug it into and then you can tote it anywhere in your shop or in your room. That's super nice too as an option, but I just went with the window because I decided its available to me. That's a little bit about how to setup your Glowforge. 6. Feeding Material : The second thing, too, is when you're using the Pro Shield, you have to take off these guards. There's a front shield, and there's also a back shield. [NOISE] They're basically exactly the same, but what this does is it covers up the vents in which you push your materials through. In the front of the Glowforge, you can see this slit right here. This is actually where your material is going to pass through in the front, and then there's another one in the back. I'm going to go ahead and grab my board and show you exactly how I feed it through the machine. Behind my Glowforge, I have this table that's on wheels, so I can easily move, and then then I've stacked some books up top because this is my board. Essentially, once I start feeding it through the back, it's going to want to tip up and down, and so I need something to stabilize it, otherwise I'm going to have to hold in it. This is my janky solution, but it works, and I'm going to show you how to do it. So I've lifted up my board. It's now resting on this underneath, and I'm simply going to push it through. Now if you've noticed, there's this little piece right here that I manually put in there to act as a guide, so that way it's straight, and I never have to worry about where to line it up again. I'll explain that in just a little bit. But some people just use little Glowforge pins and put it in the crumb tray, but I don't have any of those. You can easily make them. I just haven't made them, so this is my go-to solution. So you're simply going to push it from the back to the front to load your board, and you want to go just a couple of inches before the top of the crumb tray right there at the beginning of that. 7. Passthrough Slot: Now that we've loaded our material, the camera on the Glowforge, on the inside of the lid is now recognizing our board, which is super nice. Now, all we need to do is go up to this More button and then hit "Pro Passthrough". What that does is this dotted line now appears. It shows us basically where the print is going to sit. We need to rotate this so that it's going 90 degrees vertically and then we're going to place our artwork. I go about there. I tend to go in the middle of the board unless you want to really preserve some scraps. But just because I know that this M reaches pretty far down, so I just want to be aware of that. But I'm going to go ahead and just place it here. Basically, what that means is the cut is going to stop at this dotted line, and then we're going to have to shift our materials down. What we need to do is put in, use uncertified material, and then we need to measure our thickness using the calipers. My measurement is 0.204 inches so I'm going to submit. Then for our Cut settings, we need to hit "Cut" and we will say Manual. I'm going to say Full Power at 160. I did this test cut last night and I already know what turns a little bit, but I don't want to put masking tape on because I want you guys to be able to see the process a little bit better. But normally I would put masking tape on, which is what the color of this is. I would just experiment again if you want to use masking tape or not. But it'll help us scorch marks and I'll show the difference of what that looks like. Full power 160, I have the Glowforge Pro. So it's going to be a little bit more powerful. You might need to adjust your settings if you're using the basic. That looks good to me. I'm going to just double-check everything because I get paranoid, but that looks good. Then we're going to simply hint "Ready, Print." So it's going to load the design and just take a couple of seconds or so. It'll simply just say proofgrade material not found, that's completely fine and then it gives us three minutes and two seconds. I'm going to head over to the Glowforge and I'm going to press this big bluing glow button and then it's going to go ahead and get started. [MUSIC] Like I said, all of these fumes, the smoke that you see coming out, that's getting sucked in by my fan. It's hard to see, but it's going through that back left corner and then it's venting out the back of my window. [MUSIC] We can see that's where the Glowforge had stopped cutting. What we need to do is go back to our computer. Our computer says like, don't move your material or open the lid. What it's doing is it's going to take some pictures and then it's going to let us shift our material down. Just be patient. Don't feel like you're doing anything wrong. So now the Glowforge is prompting us to shift our material for him. What we want to do is go back to the Glowforge. But if you just go ahead and keep pushing it, that's about three inches from the front, that last cut, that's about where we want to be so then the laser can pick up and start cutting this part of it. Now you can see that the front of the board is coming out of the front slot. I'm soon going to go ahead and make sure that it's still aligned. See now there's that gap now, we want to go ahead and make sure that's flush again and aligned and then we'll go back and send the next with through. Now that we've pushed our material forward, just click "Continue", and the biggest thing I've learned when doing the Passthrough Slot is to really trust the app and how it aligns your material. It's going to do it automatically for you. So you really don't need to manually do it. It's pretty accurate, so I would just trust it even if it looks a little bit off. But actually it's going to give you a perfect cut because they've been able to calibrate it so well. I'm going to go ahead and say "Continue", since we can see that this is really clear right here. Essentially it's going to send the prints to the Glowforge again. So we get to press the blue button a second time. Here we go. [MUSIC] 8. Conclusion: I hope you guys have enjoyed learning. I've used the passthrough slot with the Glowforge. If you want to check out my other two videos, Cutting with the Glowforge and Integrating with the Glowforge, it'll go a little bit more into depth about how to use the software and other things about the Glowforge when you're setting up your files. In addition, I also have a $500 off affiliate link. Be sure to click on that link in the resources so you can get a discount on your own Glowforge if you're interested in purchasing one. Please upload a photo of your class projects of your beautiful signs, and we'll hope to see you soon.