Is anyone else here getting frustrated and dang near sick of their Glowforge?
I ordered this thing because it was supposed to be simple. Anyone could use it. You through in your material and you could (for the most part) get reliable results. It looked “so easy” on the YouTube video. You could create the world, you could cut or engrave dang near anything!
I am finding this to be much different than the warm fuzzy feeling @dan pitched in the video.
All I have found is that if you use Proofgrade materials you are pretty much okay. And that’s pretty much it. Everything else is complete trial and error and tons of time.
I have finally had it with this process. I don’t want to always use just Proofgrade materials so that I can get stuff done quickly.
For example, Glowforge is a CO2 laser. I have a 45W Pro. I have a material that I know is stainless. I want to engrave on it with Cermark. Cermark provides a sheet showing the settings that you should use depending on the material. It’s in simple inches per minute and simple power settings based on wattage. BUT NOT THE GLOWFORGE! I have to use a spreadsheet from Glowforge that is so vague to convert numbers based off of an algorithm that they have made up in their heads. And that is just for the speed.
Basically I have to waste some material, some time, and some Cermark (which is expensive as crap) to try and find the right settings (even though Cermark has provided the inches per minute and the wattage for me) just to engrave a simple design on a small piece of stainless.
I have searched the forum. Save your breath. It isn’t that simple. You always have the usual people on here that comment and tell you to search the “terms” but no real help. Don’t you think that the person probably already did that? A majority of the time there are a lot of comments that refer to “pew pew” and other comments that are trying to be funny but are really just wasting your time.
I have other types of CNC machines. For example, I have an X-Carve CNC router. I bought it knowing that I had to build it and that it was a “tinkerers” machine. I went in to it expecting what I got. I paid a lot of money for the Glowforge just to find out that it comes with a forum just like Inventables to which all of the users are left to figure out most everything by trial and error because in my case Glowforge has its own arbitrary units handed down by God himself apparently instead of using the industry standard. Well, unless you buy their materials.
If I would have known that I would have to spend pointless time on a forum trying to get stuff done, I would have just got a cheaper Chinese laser with a deeper cut bed and simple units for settings.