My family and I have enjoyed various laser cut projects. From dragons to film projectors to working trebuchets, there are a ton of cool projects on the market. And ever since our first play of Wingspan, we’ve talked about making dice towers, token organizers and other fun things on a laser cutter. This builds on all the organizers we’ve 3dD printed for our collection of board games.

We broke out Above and Below this past Thanksgiving – so organized! 😛

So, long story short, when my wife and eldest came to me with the idea of getting a laser cutter and potentially starting a side hustle, I didn’t take a lot of convincing. I may have been the one to suggest we upgrade to the 20w…

Our new xTool D1 Pro arrived this week. I had never used a laser cutter, never touched the software, and only downloaded it that day during breaks from a 12 hour workday (Please, side hustle, take me away from this madness!). I fiddled with the software at lunch and during those same breaks and sometime after 10pm when I got off work, we tried our first project, a hex based gaming coaster!

I am really pleased with the results! I think I mentioned I’d never done this before. Seriously, you set your drink on that while rolling a D20, right, right?

xTool’s software isn’t crazy intuitive as far as image editing goes, but the cutting/etching part is pretty straightforward. If you have Illustrator, Photoshop, or some other editing software, prep your images there first. This coaster was cut with the pre-sets for Basswood ply. Not sure if that’s what came in the sample pack, but there you go. IWe got a little better detail with slightly less power on future attempts, but those are all cut up from experimenting on both sides of the wood. The Yin Yang Tiger/Dragon is pretty badass. Will maybe update once our wood arrives.

One thing I personally love about xTool Creative Space is that it has a hexagon shape built in. Hexagons are not easy to create out of thin air, so what a relief!

I have more designs in the works, but I burned through the wood that came in the sample pack while testing settings to try to dial in the perfect cut and etch. We have 30 sheets of Baltic Birch plywood on the way from WoodworkersSource.com, and I have some small plum lumber I milled myself off our property, but we really should have ordered wood in advance. Initially I want to develop some cool gaming coaster sets, maybe four and six packs, hopefully followed up by an assemble-it-yourself dice tower design, and then many, many more.

Anyway, what do you all think?