I was given a glowforge plus for Christmas 2018 from my wife. I did not know I even wanted a laser cutter. I was not sure how to make room for it in my woodshop, when she said I could put it in the house! Hands down it is my most used tool for the last 8’ish years. I’ve replaced the red cable the print heads, handful of lenses, the cable that runs along the glass. I wanted to send a thank you out to this community, as I really think this community made the product absolutely great!
That said, there is room for improvement. I was going to upgrade to the pro, but decided not to when I found out the pass through was 1/4” . So I ended buying an OMTECH pronto 35. I was disappointed at first when I found out the 3.8” passthrough is blocked by the laser head! But after working with customer support, I have a new laser head tube, which gives me about 1.5” passthrough. Not quite what I wanted but if I plane down my 2” slabs to 1.5”, I can laser on much bigger materials.
In addition to that if bought both the 4 wheel and chuck rotaries, and doing glassware and tumblers is an option I could not do on my glowforge. I have external water chiller and aircompressor, but the sound is less annoying than the higher pitch from the glowforge fans.
I had to get it into the house from the sliding glass door in back, as no other exterior door was big enough to get it into the house. But I did like being able to laser on a 1.5” thick redwood slab for the back of the bench.
I did miss the glowforge camera, but setting origin with the laser dot, and framing out the area is now working out for me, I am not sure I will add the camera .
Another feature I liked about the lightwave software, it tracks hours of usage and number of jobs. This is something I asked for years ago on the glowforge.
With the speed at which the omtech works, I make jigs that I could of made on glowforge but never did. Instead of doing one offs on the glowforge, I do 12 at a time on the omtech.
I absolutely loved the glowforge, but they need to make some big updates in the product line.
Hopefully this will be taken as constructive criticism as it was intended.
Areas to improve:
1.) Sizes in all 3 dimensions and pass through
2.) Support for rotary devices
3.) More Powerful lasers
4.) Faster laser heads
5.) Fiber lasers for real metal etching