Can a laser make you money in your shop? Let's talk lasers. There are a bunch of ways that you can monetize a laser. In fact, I keep finding new and new ways to make money off this thing, and it's really, really a neat tool. When I first got it, I wanted one because it was cool. Honestly, I thought it'd be really neat to have a laser in the shop. I didn't have much of a plan for it other than customizing cutting boards. And that's kind of where things started. I mean, this is just a tray. Can you go to Target and get a tray? Yeah, you can't go to Target and get a tray. Can you go to Target and get a tray with this exact design on it, or with someone's grandma's cookie recipe? You can't. You have to go to a craftsman or someone who has a wood shop and a laser to engrave it on there. And those are just some of the things that got me going when I got my laser. This is a simple kitchen conversion chart. I sold a bunch of these for a long time, and it was really a big focus on my business. It was cutting boards and little home decor items and kitchen knick knacks and goods like that, and it helped me get my business going. It was kind of an unintentional direction that my business kind of pulled itself because when I was making items that other people could easily make like this shape out of a piece of wood, the thing that set me apart was the ability to add an engraving to it and make it custom for them. Something I've noticed about having a laser is that products that I've never would have thought I would make fall in my lap. For example, this is a table number identifier thing. I don't know. It's for a conference, and I've made these multiple times for the same company. And it's just a table marker. Has a number on it. Honestly, there was 38 tables at this event. They needed table markers. People come into the event. They are assigned to a table. They need to find a table. It's a silly kind of kitschy product, but you really can't make money on this product unless you're doing it on a laser. You could do it on the CNC, but it's not going to have these tight corners. And honestly, the laser is really fast with stuff like this. One thing you need to consider with lasers is cut power. There's a lot of different laser wattage. Everything's determined in watts. You can start with something like a 10 watt or a 7 watt diode laser. This is a CO2 laser. This is 150 watts. This has a lot of cutting power. A lot of what we use the laser for is for cutting. We don't do a ton of engraving, which this can still engrave, but it's much better at cutting than engraving. This is obviously cut out. This is done with the high power laser. It does a great job on that. With these smaller wattage lasers like a 7 or 10 watt or some of the 40 watts, they'll engrave really nicely, but they're going to struggle to cut through material. And that's a factor you need to think about. That is good. Another great product you can make on the laser is tumblers. These came up kind of randomly. Someone asked if I could do them. And I was like, yeah, I'm pretty sure I can. I did have to invest in a nice rotary to do them, and I would recommend not going cheap. I went cheap for my first one, and it was a problem. The one I got after that was much more expensive, but it's far more reliable. When you're trying to make money on something, you need a tool that actually does the job well. Tumblers aren't something I love making, but when a customer orders two to three hundred of them, the margins are really good, and they're actually a really great way to build a relationship with a customer you may not have had before. I've had a lot of these tumbler customers. They're corporate big businesses. They need several hundred of these for their VIP clients. They reach out for these tumblers. We lock down an order with them. We do a great job. They find out we make furniture, and they've ordered tables like 50% of the time. Another great thing for my business with the laser is that I can make client gifts, and they're really high for personalized. Those tumblers, I send those out to clients pretty regularly. Also I'll send them cutting boards with their company name on there, their actual name on there. Really cool things that they can't get it any store. If I want to say thank you for spending X amount of dollars with my business, I can send them a nice little thing at the end of the job, and it builds really nice customer rapport. This is one of my best selling laser products. We sell a handful of these a month, but during the fall season, holiday season, we sell anywhere from 10 to 40 of these a month for the holidays like Christmas. Some people order 10 of these, and we'll ship them directly to their family members or friends as gifts, and it's a great product. This is cut out by the CNC, but it's lasered on the laser. It really is in terms of time impact, not a hard product for us to make, and it sells really well. And we make good margins on them. So this has become a really good product that I carry in my store and on my Etsy store. Outside of the products that I make for myself to sell to end users, I make products for clients that they sell to end users. One of the best examples of that is this high-end audio component. It's a grounding box. This is handcrafted from the ground up. It's a beautiful piece when they're all finished up. And we wanted every part of it to be very custom, and what we did is made a custom plaque for it. The plaque has the company name, and it has the product name on it. It looks really nice. It adds a ton of value to the piece, and there's no other grounding box on the market that has this look. As my business grows, and I learn more about how to run a business, the thing that's the most valuable to me is time. Time is money. And one thing that the laser does really well to save us a lot of time and put money back in my pocket is making templates. And I'm going to make a quick template over here. I've already brought in a vector. The software I use is called Lightburn. This is pretty universally loved amongst the laser-ing community. I guess it's called the laser-ing community. Laser rights. It's real simple. All you do is make your file, buy a file, get a file in here somehow, set it up to what you want, and send it to the laser. I've already sent this one over, so it's going to tell us it's over there, but it's as simple as... Now it's at the laser. So let's go cut it out. That was maybe five minutes. Maybe five minutes. If I had to do this by hand, it would be on the bandsaw, the edge belt sander, or the spindle sander. It could take me as much as like 45 minutes if I'm not very proficient at it. This was five minutes. It took no time. We don't do a lot of cutting board templates necessarily. We do sell these, but we don't use them in the shop. But we use this process for furniture templates. I design all of my furniture in CAD, so we already have the vector files ready to go to dump in here. So being able to knock out a template in minutes, it's invaluable. I can make a lot of money because I'm saving a lot of time, and we're very efficient at making templates and furniture pieces because of this machine. Let's talk downsides. Lasers can be very finicky, and they do require a decent amount of maintenance. The first thing is that they're powered by a laser tube. There's a tube behind the shroud. It turns light and focuses it and hits off of a mirror over there. A mirror over here, a mirror right here, and then goes down and hits through the slings and becomes a powerful beam of energy. You have to learn how to align all that stuff, and that isn't something you align once and you walk away from. Those do go out of alignment, and that's because this machine's constantly moving, and they actually move really quick, so they start to just go out of alignment and you have to learn how to align them. It's not something that's easy or intuitive to figure out. You will have to watch some videos on that, but you're something you're going to be doing regularly as you use your machine. This has very precise servos, and they need to be maintained regularly. The belts need to be cleaned, the motors need to be cleaned, and they need to be greased regularly as well. The other thing is, these machines don't like dust, and I'm in a wood shop, and it gets really dusty. We weekly clean this machine out, and every month or so we are looming everything with white lithium grease. It's just basic maintenance stuff, but you really need to stay on top of it with these machines, especially an expensive one where if it breaks, it's going to be really expensive to fix. Lasers are uniquely equipped to offer things that other tools can't offer. My lasers have absolutely paid for themselves, and they've brought in a lot of great revenue. People are seeking out shops that can do this work for them, and as soon as the word gets out that you have one, you'll start having new clients asking for new products that you never thought you'd make before.