Everyone’s seen the usual mandala, I wanted something different. I found this one and worked with the artist, Tony Bamber, to prep it for lasering.
Before I go any further, here’s how you can find Tony’s work. He’s really talented!
And here’s the specific piece that this is based on:
The final version is almost identical to the original, some very small adjustments had to be made to accommodate the 18" diameter and laser realities.
Lasery details: baltic birch plywood, everything scored. Total job time: several hours across multiple steps, essentially takes an entire day to do it. It’s a lot of paths. I won’t get into all the details about how I pulled this together, but I will say that this project pushed the limits of nearly every aspect of using a Glowforge, from path preparation to job setup to alignment issues (manually aligned, no passthrough), it was all quite difficult.
Inkscape would routinely choke and hang when I tried to work with it even in sections.
The UI would choke and fail to load the files, sometimes at random. Like it wouldn’t work, then I’d retry and the file would load. I think I was right on the edge of a timeout.
that’s probably at least 4.0. you’re getting pretty massive at 36" squared. 36 width isn’t that uncommon. but 36 depth? that’s generally a beast machine. universal doesn’t have a 36" depth machine. they have 36x24 and 48x24. probably would be an open flatbed laser.
At this point I doubt we’ll ever see a Glowforge 2.0, it’s just safer to assume that it’ll never come to be than to try to live in some fantasy future. Dance with the one that brung you, you know?
