You can get blanks for almost anything these days: bottle openers, coasters, keyrings, wallets, hip flasks. Add your own designs and a bit of personality, and you've got something people may want to buy. If you're thinking about selling what you make, this is where I'd start.
I'm not going to promise you'll make a fortune. Nobody can. What I can show you is a practical, repeatable way to make good-looking items efficiently, which is the part you control. It's based on two of my videos: the bottle opener workflow above, and three beginner blanks I'd start with.
Jump to: Pick your blanks · Designs you're allowed to sell · Batch with a jig · Bottle opener workflow · Three more starter items · Before you sell
1. Pick blanks that are cheap, practical and popular
Start with blanks that don't cost much, are easy to buy in bulk and that people actually use. The ones I'd point a beginner to:
- Round bamboo bottle openers. Cheap to buy, and everyone needs a bottle opener.
- Slate coasters. Tricky to get right, but brilliant when you do, and a popular item.
- Metal business cards. Painted aluminum cards come up really well.
- PU leather keyrings. Very common, very cheap, and they engrave well. They come in lots of colors.
The nice thing about these is they work whether you sell them or not. If something doesn't sell, it still makes a good gift for friends and family.
2. Only use designs you're allowed to sell
I use a subscription design site for most of my artwork. Most designs on it come with a commercial license, but not all, so always check the license on each one before you put it on something you sell. A few tips:
- Search for SVG along with your theme (I searched "beer" for bottle openers). SVG is a vector file, which is ideal for engraving.
- Pick a bundle with a few variations. If you're going to a craft fair or trade show, offering some variety helps, because you don't know which one will sell best.
- Don't put celebrities, film characters or other people's logos on things you sell. That breaches their rights and can get a shop taken down. Keep those for personal projects.
3. Batch with a jig and save your template
If you're selling, your time is valuable. Engraving several items in one go saves time and effort, and most importantly it's repeatable. My round bottle opener jig holds nine bottle openers at once on the F1 Ultra, F2 Ultra and F2 Ultra UV.
Once you've set a file up, save it. You then have a fully set up job you can run again any time. If one design turns out to be popular, you can make it over and over without starting from scratch.
4. The bottle opener workflow, step by step
I recorded this on the xTool F1 Ultra in xTool Creative Space, the software before xTool Studio. The steps are the same idea in Studio, though some buttons may sit in different places.
Set the material
- Click the material box at the top right.
- Go to Wood and search for bamboo. Pick the option that looks closest to your blank. It won't always be exact, but it gives you a ballpark to start from.
- Select your machine and choose Engrave. You'll see a test grid of settings for that material.
- Click the box again, select the material and click Confirm. It doesn't apply until you do this.
Lay out the designs
- Import the jig template. All my jigs come with one, shown as red circles. It's for alignment only and doesn't engrave.
- Drag in all your SVGs. It looks like a mess at first, so drag them off to the side so you can see them all and choose.
- Resize each design into a circle on the template, filling the space as much as you can.
- Drag a box around all the designs and apply your settings.
On my bamboo bottle openers I used:
| F1 Ultra, bamboo | Laser | Power | Speed | Passes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Engrave | Blue light | 95% | 300 mm/s | 1 |
| Score outline | Blue light | 85% | 100 mm/s | 1 |
Bamboo varies from batch to batch, so test one first.
Frame, then switch on smart processing
As with any jig, click Framing and check by eye that everything lands on the items. This is also when to check your focus.
This tip saves a lot of time. By default the software plans the path automatically and goes back and forth horizontally across everything. Instead:
- Click the three little lines next to the process settings.
- Change the processing path to User defining.
- Turn on Smart.
Now the preview follows the shape of each design instead. On my nine bottle openers it saved 4 minutes of engraving time.
Add a score outline
Don't take them out yet. Select all the designs again, switch them to Score and run it. It traces a defining line around every design so it pops and looks crisper. On bamboo especially, which can look a bit faded, it makes a real difference.
Clean them up
Wood and other materials pick up soot when you engrave. Before you sell anything, clean it. I sprayed mine with IPA and wiped them, and you could see the residue on the cloth. Giving your customer the cleanest product possible matters.
5. Three more starter items
These are the three blanks from my beginner items video, done on the original xTool F1, also in xTool Creative Space.
Slate coasters
- Focus by turning the knob until the two dots meet.
- Pick a high quality photo and remove the background. With no background noise, you get a much cleaner contrast on slate.
- Crop the bounding box close to the image, so framing shows exactly where it'll go.
- Turn it to grayscale if it isn't black and white already, and add sharpness to make it pop.
- Invert the image, because slate engraves light on dark. Otherwise it looks like a negative.
- Draw a circle over it, select both, right click and choose Mask to crop it round to suit the coaster. Then add some curved text.
Settings on the F1: infrared, dot duration 550, power 100%, 450 DPI, Jarvis.
Metal business cards
These are a favorite of mine because the result is so effective. The process is the same as slate: remove the background, add sharpness, invert for a black card, crop the box tight and add text. Personalized photo cards make lovely keepsakes. On the F1 I used infrared, dot duration 90, power 100%, 500 DPI.
PU leather keyrings
I used a tree of life design with space for a family reunion message. That's the sort of thing you could make for everyone at a family event, or sell as a personalized item. Set the design up once for each keyring in the jig, add the name (I used Smith as an example), select everything and apply the settings.
Settings on the F1: blue light, power 80%, speed 400 mm/s, 120 lines per cm. The different colors make the design pop in different ways, so experiment.
Before you sell anything
- Test on a spare. Always buy a few extra blanks so you can test without wasting stock.
- Frame every job. A great design that's off center or wonky is ruined, and so is the blank.
- Check every license for the designs and fonts you use.
- Clean each piece before it goes in a bag or a box.
- Start small. Make a few of each design, see what people actually buy, then make more of those.
For tested settings on lots more blanks, see my free Laser Settings Library. If you're after jigs to batch your items, they're in the F1 and F2 jigs and the F1 Ultra and F2 Ultra jigs.
What are you thinking of making? Tell me in the comments on the video. I always love seeing what you make.
