In all seriousness, as a thought experiment… it might work, but the big problems with a dishwasher that come to mind are:
The gunk on your tray is probably really bad for you, I wouldn’t want to contaminate my dishwasher… I put my forks in there, man.
Bits of laser debris might cause problems in the water pump/drain.
The heat from the dry stage of a normal dishwasher run might be too intense, especially for the plastic parts. I would avoid high heat for fear of warp/damage. At the very least, I’d put things on the top shelf, and/or turn off the dry feature.
Me? I wish glowforge would release a half-height tray and a long focus lens. I’d buy one without hesitation. It would allow for engraving the inside of deep trays, etc.
After going through 7 months of hell (unplanned kitchen remodel with a contractor who turned out to be awful) related to what started as a leak with the hose from the dishwasher, I’ll pass…
Seriously, had so many plans for this year but my Glowforge was inaccessible for months this year. Sorry I’m still a little emotionally triggered if you can’t tell
Supply shortages due to covid played a part but the contractors being @$$&%#%$ was worst. lol Anyway, I digress…
I am going to try to plan on deep cleaning the crumb tray in the next couple of weeks. We will see… lol
Word of caution about dismantling the crumb tray for cleaning – @evansd2 and others have successfully done so, but other users have not been so lucky. The trick is to get it back together perfectly square so that the focal plane doesn’t go all cattywampus (yes, it’s a technical term ).
I took apart the tray on my first unit 4+ years ago and wished I hadn’t - it was never quite the same afterward. The only cleaning I undertake on my current machine is to vacuum it out with a 1-gal shop-vac I mounted next to it for that specific use. I’ve never had a problem with char or crumb buildup in the past four years.
No disrespect to anyone else, but if it ain’t actually broke, don’t fix it. Just my opinion, YMMV of course. Good luck.
I wonder if there has been some sort of design change to crumb trays since then? Mine is sort of bulletproof; I can’t imagine how I could do anything to reassemble it “incorrectly”.
EEK. This is what I’m afraid of.
Maybe I’ll just keep pushing the little bits down into the tray and keep trying to dump them all out and cleaning it the best I can.
And maybe try the air compressor for the parts i can’t seem to get out. (Using ear plugs though, I would not have even thought of that being an issue.)
I can’t speak for anyone else but I do it for a few reasons:
My tray gets so dirty that it can mark the back of materials with sticky black residue.
Small cutouts get stuck in the comb more often because of said residue.
The residue gets thick enough that it makes it difficult to put pins in the comb.
When removing pins, bits of black tar come up with them, getting on my material and sometimes marking the surface or getting on my hands where I inevitably smear it.
I’ve never tried it but I suspect that stuff is flammable. I’m not worried about fire per se but I’ve always suspected that it can contribute to the amount of smoke generated by a cut.
So it’s a bit of a pain but I think it’s worth it for me.
I know you were specifically discussing using an air compressor and not having to take it apart, but for all the newcomers who see this topic, I do want to link to the ur-post about crumb tray cleaning, which was magnificent. Back in the day before the black crumb trays one really wanted to clean these things.
I use a vacuum with a brush on the top - which pushes most of the stuff down, and then tilt it forward over a big trash can so they can all fall out the hole in the front - but when something is truly stuck I turn everything on and run cut lines over the stuck things - once they’ve been broken up into smaller pieces they fall through easily!
The tray is designed to handle being lasered so no worries about damaging it.
Fair enough - I did say “unless it’s affecting your cut quality”.
There have been so many posts about broken all sorts of things after a ‘deep clean’ I now fall on the “clean only what is necessary” side.
Personally, this post confirmed for me that I do not want to take the tray apart and/or soak the tray. It sounds like that might have been more likely to be successful with the previous version of the tray, though.
I think I’ll just stick with dumping the tray, pushing the bits down into the tray if I can’t pull them out, vacuuming, and trying @deirdrebeth 's suggestion of cutting up something if it’s truly stuck in there! And if there are little pieces that don’t want to come out from under the honeycomb, maybe try the air compressor.
For another perspective, I fill a large trash bag with water and cleaner on my drive way and leave the whole tray to soak until I remember it again, then rinse and use a leaf blower to dry it out
I’ve never done anything to my crumb tray but dump it out and maybe poke through little pieces that get stuck partway through. It looks awful, but it works just fine! I’m thinking maybe if enough gunk accumulates, it will make my hold-down pins stick better.
We will see… lol
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