Laser Engraving Meets UV Printing and WOW! - Eufy Make E1 Full Review

What do you think happens when you combine laser engraving with UV printing? Holy. Oh yeah.

It's the one I'm going to be [Music] wearing. It's kind of nuts. Hey everybody, welcome back to Laser Engraving 911.

On this episode, we're going to talk about the UI Make UV Printer E1. We're going to talk about this portable desktop UV printer right here and how I combine it with the power of laser engraving. I've been wanting UV printing technology in my shop for some time now, but as I looked around at all the UV printers, um, they're not really in my price range, you know what I mean?

So, when the UI E1 UV printer came out and I saw what it was capable of doing and I saw the price tag on it, I was like, that is something I need to have in my shop. And that's exactly what we're going to get into today. I'm going to show you all kinds of projects that we can do combining laser engraving with UV printing and really get into the details of this machine and what it's capable of.

Spoiler alert, it's pretty badass. So, if that sounds like something you want to get into, then buckle up, get your pen and paper out, cuz we're about to get into it on Laser Engraving 911. [Music] So, before we get into some projects, I figured some people still might not know what UV printing is.

UV printing is a special kind of printer that uses a UV sensitive ink. So, basically, it's printing ink with a UV resin inside of the ink that is cured instantaneously by the power of an ultra bright UV lamp that's in there. What that means is that you can print on almost any surface possible because the ink is getting instantly dried and bonding to the surface of that material.

And that's what makes these kind of printers so interesting to me. You can print on tumblers, you can print on wood, you can print on leatherrett, you can print on acrylic, you can print on metal, and the list goes on and on and on. And I've actually been printing like nuts here in the shop, just seeing what will stick and what can't.

And I think you'll be really surprised at some of the projects that we've come up with. All right, so first let's give you a quick overview of all the different attachments and the printer itself. So, first I want to talk about how compact this is.

When the unit is folded up, like this is it. I don't know if you can like it. I mean, this table's pretty big, but you could see how compact this unit is.

And depending on what bed you put in, the way it gets the ability to work on such a large surface area is it actually feeds it right through from the front to the back. So, as far as taking up any space in your shop, not going to happen. Next, I want to talk about the software.

So, the software that comes with it is called Yuthi Makeake. The software is great. It's very drag and drop, easy to control, not complicated at all, and it's very userfriendly.

All right, next, let's talk about full color printing. This unit comes with the full range of colors. So, you've got full CMYK, you've got white, and you've also got gloss capabilities with this UV printer.

So, because you've got white, your prints are going to be ultra vibrant on even dark surfaces. And of course, since you have the gloss feature, you can put that high nice enamel finish on any of your prints. So, let's talk about the rotary for a second.

This thing is going to blow your mind. This is a fully automated rotary attachment that goes right into the machine. And it is, when I say fully automated, what I mean is that you just put the cup in there and it figures out where the cup is in space, how to level it to make sure that it's level to the print head, and basically just takes all of that guesswork out of the game completely.

So, we'll talk about the rotary in a little bit. Let's talk next about the bed sizes. It comes with multiple bed sizes.

As you can see, this bed size is substantial for a UV printer at this size. This is a very substantial bed size. And it also comes with a mini bed.

The mini bed is just when you have small batch jobs, you can fill up the bed and print on anything that's on this as well. So, it's pretty cool that they have these multiple bed sizes. And once again, this is a smart UV printer.

So, as soon as you dock in one of these bed sizes, it automatically detects what size bed you've put in. The UI E1 also comes with a DTF laminator. So, that means that you can print on the special film and then create your own decals with the UI, which is super cool.

It also has a really, really cool dual laser height mapping feature where once you place the object in here, it uses multiple lasers to make sure that the height is super accurate of the object you're about to print on. And watching it is probably one of the funner things that I've gotten to experience when using this printer. But maybe it's just because I like lasers a lot.

One of the other things that I really like about this printer is the fact that Euthake has made a great effort to make sure that this is a very lowmaintenance machine. And what I mean by that is when I'm not using the machine, it's been a couple days at a time. I can hear it in there making sure that the print heads are clean, making sure that the print heads aren't getting clogged up, keeping those print heads moist, which is a pain point for a lot of UV printers like this.

So, right on to Yui Makeake for making sure that that was a feature that everyone can benefit from. The other thing that it has is right in here, it's got its own charcoal air filter to get rid of any kind of smell or fumes when you're doing UV printing because there can be some. But this little replaceable filter also does a great job at that.

Listen, there's a lot of other features of this printer that we just can't get into in this video. I'll list a link in the description below so you can just do a deep dive into all the different DPI printing specs and all the other color management features. But what I really want to do is just get into how I've been using this printer here in my laser engraving business to enhance or combine with other laser engraving projects.

because in my opinion that is the most exciting part about this printer is what you can do when you combine laser engraving and UV printing together. Enough about the specs of this machine. Let's get into some projects.

All right, so let's talk about my first project that I tackled was I wanted to laser cut some acrylic using my CO2 laser using some specific shapes that matched some midjourney art that I created to make some 3D embossed printed pins. So, I've got a little piece of sushi here that I made on some 1/8 inch acrylic. I've got a little poison apple and that came out pretty cool.

I've also got a bowl of ramen. And I I really need to zoom in on these so you can really appreciate the 3D texture and the 3D embossing on these because it's kind of mind-blowing. I'm looking at it right now and I still can't get over how detailed the art is and how amazing the colors are.

And then finally, my favorite one was the cheeseburger or actually multistacked hamburger that I made. all the little textures of the sesame seeds, the lettuce, the cheese, the tomatoes. It's it's all in there and it's actually 3D embossed.

Now, these pins took a few minutes to make. And that's one of the things that I wanted to point out is when you are doing 3D raised printing on this printer or any other UV printer, that process is going to take longer because it's got to build up those 3D layered textures and then put final color over the top. But these came out amazing and they were very easy to make.

Once they were done, I just grabbed some pin hardware, glued it to the back, put the little pin hardware on. So, you can make your own custom 3D pins using this printer and your laser machine. Let's go on to the next project.

All right. Next, we're going to talk about printing on acrylic. Now, you've probably already seen lots of vendors out there like Smoky Hill Designs selling pattern print acrylic where they either take thin acrylic sheets like this that's transparent and they print these amazing patterns and then you get to go and laser cut that out.

Well, that's exactly what this machine can do. So, you can fill up that printing bed with as many sheets of cast acrylic that you want to. You can use ultra thin acrylic like this.

You can use 1/16th, 1/8, or even thicker, and you can print right on that with amazing, stunning, detailed results. So, this is just a little flower pattern we did, and then we went over and laser cut some earring components out of it. Another cool project that we did was we took some clear acrylic and then I printed a stained glass pattern on the whole piece of acrylic.

Then we laser cut out a wood frame and then laser cut out the cross out of that printed acrylic that we just did and then put it all together to make this nice suncatcher right here which came out super cool. It's totally transparent. The detail of the stained glass pattern is amazing.

And then finally, Yui Make sent me this lighted picture frame with blank sheets of acrylic. So think about that. You can also get some lighted picture frames and then you can just keep swapping out whatever picture you want to print on the acrylic and depending on your mood for the day.

I was feeling like I wanted to do a Borderlands poster here for my picture frame and that came out amazing. But I mean you could do family photos in here. You could do advertisements for businesses in here.

But once again, printing on acrylic is no problem for this thing. It was very easy to do. I would say the hardest thing to do was to go on not hard but you know go on midjourney or however you create your patterns in your software and making sure that you come up with a nice repeatable tile pattern.

And if you're interested in learning a quick tutorial on how I generated these tile patterns using MidJourney, I'll list a link in the description of this video on how you can go up and sign up for a free membership over at lasergenraving9911. com. Once you do, you'll be able to access the downloads area and the videos area, and that's where I'll put my short tutorial on how we created patterns for UV printing on acrylic.

It's pretty basic, but it does require a little bit more education to get it just right. Link in the description below. All right, next we're going to talk about printing on metal.

So, I did a little project and this is actually going to be a giveaway, so pay attention. So, what I did was I had some windproof lighters laying around. Just some chromeplated windproof lighters.

Can't call them Zippo because I hear their trademark lawyers are horrible. So, they're not Zippos, they're windproof lighters. Anyway, I had some laying around and what I did was I printed some vintage graphics on them, but what I did is I left a place to engrave and personalize them over on the fiber laser.

And so I have three of them that I printed out using these old vintage graphics. They came out really cool. One of the things I thought would happen for sure is when I printed across the seam here that it would glue lighter shut, and it does not.

It actually printed really, really well. And the way I was able to or the way I chose to register the art right on top of the windproof lighter was I actually created this little outline template and printed it on some card stock. And that's what I wanted to talk to you about really quick.

So, one helpful tip I have for this printer and pretty much any other UV printer is get some card stock and you want to laser cut yourself out some cardboard stock to place directly on the printer bed that covers the whole printer bed. And it's a sticky bed, too, so it's going to stick down. And what you're doing by using these sacrificial cutouts is you're able to overp print over things without printing on your actual sticky bed, which is very handy for making sure that your artwork gets over the whole object.

So, all you have to do is measure the large bed, measure the small bed, and just go down to the art supply store, grab some card stock or whatever, and just have these handy. So, anytime you're going to be doing over printing, so you can see where I printed out the exact shape of these lighters first. Then I placed the lighters using a little bit of blue tape underneath the object.

So, that includes any object that you're going to put on the sacrificial boards. You always want to use a little bit of blue tape. Stuck it down.

And then I brought in the graphics on the second layer and just printed the color graphics on top of the lighter with perfect registration. and a little bit of overblade, which you can see right there. But I didn't ruin my print bed, which is awesome.

So, here's what you need to do to win one of these customized lighters because we're going to customize them with whatever you want me to engrave in this section here. So, here's what you got to do. I want you to drop a comment on this video on either what is the feature that you like best about the UI E1 so far, or what you would use the UI UV printer for in your shop.

That's all you got to do. If you feel like throwing a like on this video, that's awesome, too. In a few weeks, we will pick three winners and we'll reach out to you and then we will engrave one of these lighters and send it your way with whatever you tell us to engrave on the lighter.

Let's keep it not, you know, within reason. All right. So, printing on metal with the UI UV printer, no problem.

And you could even take it a step further as a special gift if you wanted and print on these tin covers. And if you want to know where I got these blank lighters, I'll list a link in the description below. Now, we're gonna talk about one of my favorite things of the UVME E1, the rotary attachment.

This rotary attachment locks into the system just like all the other tables. There's a little docking station. You just lock it in and then it knows that you're wanting to print cups.

So, one of the coolest things about this rotary is not like any other rotary in your laser engraving machine that you can buy, but in a way it's very similar. And you can tell that they took a lot of tips from other rotaries for laser engravers. So, check this out.

So, you've got your slider that moves back and forth depending on what size cup you want to do. And you've got your little arm that goes in and holds the cup. Once you slide this board, it holds the cup against against the drive wheels here.

Sorry. Um, it holds the cup against the drive wheels. If those drive wheels are too shallow, it actually comes with extenders that you can extend on for different cups.

And one of the things I really, really like about this is that once you dock it in, it automeasures the circumference of the cup and actually levels the cup for you. Let me just say that again. And it actually levels the cup for you.

I'm not kidding. So, it uses those dual lasers that we talked about earlier in this video to figure out when the cup is level, which I think is very innovative and a very cool feature. So, you don't even have to mess around with that.

I was able to print on a multitude of cups. I did this nice little doughut full wrap using the printer here and the rotary. I also did this pint glass coffee cup right here with some Star Wars coffee logo.

Don't don't sue me Starbucks. And then also one of the other cool features of this rotary is it's actually able to do cups with handles to a certain extent. One of the things when you're doing mugs like this with handles is you will have a limited area that it can print on.

So there is kind of a gap here. But this is actually a combination of printing and engraving that I did. Paul, this is my wife's artwork that I printed all around the front of the mug.

And then I laser engraved her name over on the CO2 laser right through the UV printing. And she loves it. It came out really, really cool.

One thing I will tell you about the rotary that I hope they can change soon is that right now it currently only works with cups that have a straight edge to them. And that's because of the automeasuring feature. So you notice how all these are straight and they're not like the JDS 20 oz tumblers that actually have a slight curve to it.

It did have a little bit of an issue automeasuring and autoleveling this kind of cup, but they assured me that they are working on getting that fixed. I was able to print on this cup one time successfully with no problems whatsoever. When I went to go print another JDS 20 ounce polar camel cup, it was not able to level it properly.

It's just one of those things that I think by the time they fully release the product, they'll have nailed down. I've already seen them nail down tons of other smaller issues. Damn, son.

That is impressive. They're really a great team over there. But the rotary attachment is a gamecher, especially when you combine it with laser engraving because now you can start offering your customers the option to have laser engraved logos, colored logos on their cups, or combined laser engraving and color logos.

And I think that is awesome. Okay. All right.

All right. Next up, we're going to talk about leatherrett and making leatherrett patches for hats, but not your ordinary leatherrett patches for hat. No, folks, we're going to be doing full color leatherrett patches using our laser engraver and the UI E1.

So, let me show you what I did. So, this hat right here is a piece of Lonear adhesive that we actually printed right here on the UV printer with these old oil brand gas can logos. And then what I did was I actually printed the stitching as well.

I totally cheated to make it look like a stitched leatherrett patch but in full color. I did some other old vintage patches like this. I did one in the shape of this and not to mention the one that I'm wearing right now and have been wearing in this whole video and the process was really fun.

That's the one I'm gonna be wearing right there. So, because I don't have print and cut technology on any of my lasers, which is something I hope to have later this year, I did this process a couple of different ways. The first way I did it was I actually cut out a piece of leatherrett, brought it over to the CO2 laser and just a small little area so I could do a test on.

I put that in the UI and I used the camera to align my artwork on top of that material and just printed out the full graphic on the leatherrett. Then I went back over to the laser and used a cut line and the camera on my laser to just cut out the patch. The other way that I did it was I actually created trace outlines of these patches and only printed a trace outline on a piece of cardboard which was on the print bed.

So I didn't print directly on the print bed. I placed my blank patches on those little registration marks and once again use the Euimake camera system to bring in my artwork and place it right on top of where it needed to print on the leatherrett. You know, there's lots of different ways to make colored leatherrett patches.

Those are two of the ways that I used and the results were just amazing. The cool thing about it is the UV printing will last a lifetime. The hat press and the heat from the hat press does not affect it at all.

It doesn't change the color and everything just acts the same as it normally would if it was just a regular engraved patch. And the results are sick. Straight up.

I'm I'm not going to lie, it looks pretty cool. It's a little cheesy that I got fake stitching on there, but you know, it was just one of those things where if you could do it, why not try it, right? All right.

Now, you have the ability to add full vibrant color, and I think that's awesome. All right, so we're nearing the end of the video, but I couldn't leave the video without talking about some of the other projects we did that some of them kind of had to do with a little bit of laser cutting, but most of them had to just do with printing on wood. I've got a couple of examples here.

I printed this nice picture for my daughter in her room. She wanted a decoration. She loved it.

I had AI generate a kind of Studio Gibliesesque type animation of a girl drawing in her room. My daughter loves drawing in her room and she loves Studio Gibli. So, what do you think?

Is that what you wanted? Yes, this is what I wanted. Okay, I like it.

Thank you, Dad. All right, enjoy. Go be gone with you.

My wife has always wanted a please remove your shoes funky sign for the front of our house and I just took this cheap piece of wood from Michael's craft store and printed directly on it with no surface prep. That came out really cool. I also printed some of my wife's art on canvas.

The colors and the fidelity of this reprint of her actual original artwork is fantastic. And then finally for my son, we did another print on wood with some cut acrylic embellishments. This is Devastator.

He's one of my favorite Transformers. He's a Decepticon, in case you didn't know. But he puts that in his room.

And all of these I did just to test out the print quality. Some of the other things we did that were super fun is we printed on these glass perfume bottles. And believe it or not, with a little bit of methanol surface prep on the top of glass, you can print directly on glass and it actually holds up really well.

But you do need to prep the surface of glass or any other slick surface. And methanol seems to be working really well. The other thing I did was a extreme 3D embossment of myself with a largemouth bass on this ceramic coaster right here.

The level of 3D embossment and the detail on this was pretty stunning. I mean really I honestly with everything you've seen today, I'm just getting started on all the different things I'm probably going to print. I will be experimenting more and probably releasing some other videos on the UI.

It is an incredible tool. So far, I've been doing everything that I've always wanted to do with a UV printer, but at a fraction of the cost some of these other UV printers. Now that I've kind of shared some of the other things that we've done, let's get into kind of my things I love about it and things that I hope they improve on.

So, here's a couple of things that I love about this printer. First and foremost, I love how easy it is to use. From the software to the daily maintenance to how it's smart and intuitive, and anytime I load a new table or the rotary in, it just knows exactly what I want to do.

And I love the interface of how easy it is using the camera to just bring artwork in and just drop it right on the object that you're trying to print on. I do love the fact that it has multiple different printing modes. So you can print with a white base and then color or you can print color, white color.

All those different features make it very easy to use and very intuitive. It even has a preview feature where you can get a virtual preview, whether it's 3D or not, of what your object is going to look like based on the settings. So, that's pretty cool.

The other thing I like about it is how compact it is. It is very compact and it doesn't take up much space at all in my shop. So, it's easy to move around and I can just pretty much place it anywhere and get started printing.

Even with the doors open, even with the beds in, it is super compact. For the size that it can print and its size, it's pretty amazing what it can do. And even though your biggest bed is very generous on how much you can print, they actually have more attachments coming out soon where you can do continuous printing and print even longer from a roll.

So, that's pretty exciting. And the last thing I love about this unit is what it means for my business. It's going to open up the doors for me to offer color personalization on pretty much all the other products that I've been personalizing already and some of the products that customers bring to me.

So, that's a new exciting endeavor for my main laser engraving business that I can now start promoting and telling customers that I can now print their item in color and if I want to combine it with engraving as well. All right. And last but not least, finally, if I'm being honest, there are some things that I would like to see Yuthi make improve.

And here are some of them. So, the first thing I'd like to see them improve or come up with is some larger ink tanks. As you can see right now, the ink tanks, they're pre-filled.

They're not the largest in the world. I haven't run out of any of these ink tanks yet, but I'd like to see them offer like maybe a double size XL tank since there's no sensors up here. It would be cool if they extended it like way up here so you have the option to have larger ink tanks.

The other thing I'd like to see them make some improvements on is the software itself. While it is great software and very userfriendly, there's definitely some things that I've run into that I wish were different. I hope that the software in the future handles vectors a little bit better.

The ability to bring in your artwork or vectors at size. Currently, that's not offered. So, you have to resize artwork once you bring it into the software.

And I'd also like to see a wider range of color management options and different color profiles so you can have more control over saturation and other things like that. Even though I really didn't see any problem with any of the prints, they actually came out looking almost identical to what was on my screen, which is really impressive, but I think that people are going to want a little bit more control when it comes to color management. And then finally, I'd like to see them add some more features for batch processing operations.

What I mean by that is if you're going to be doing the same thing over and over and over again, I'd like to see them have a quick repeat print so you can just load the next item, load the next item without having it calibrate every time or find the height of the object again and just know and trust that you are doing the same thing over and over again because you're doing a batch. That would be super cool. All right.

Well, if you made it this far, thanks for hanging out with me to learn about the UI E1 portable desktop UV printer. It's definitely portable. It's definitely fits on your desktop and it is an amazing machine.

I've listed links below if you want to check out more details about this printer and you can get in on the action during their Kickstarter campaign and I believe they have some really, really nice promotions going on over there. So, if you want to get more details, you can click that link. Once again, thank you so much for all your support.

I really enjoyed working with this machine and it is really nice to have UV printing in my shop and I will continue to come up with different creations and hopefully share them with you all. And when you get your Yui Make E1, I would love it if you would share some of your creations with me. And remember, if you want to get entered to win any of those custom engraved lighters, make sure you drop that comment below.

Give this video a like and in a few weeks we'll be picking some of the winners. So until next time, we'll see you around on Laser Engraving 911.