Bed image inaccurate (material not shown to scale)

Hello!

When bringing in my scaled drawings to app.glowforge.com the bed image is NOT shown to scale. This is an issue because I can’t accurately place the drawing on to the material (material appearance is much smaller than the drawing). The drawings come into the app at the correct scale — my issue is the bed image is off (much smaller). A few details on the print:

  • material: 1/8" matte white acrylic sheet
  • sheet size: 20" x 11.75"
  • offset: 1/4"
  • exported from Rhino as PDF (vector, 1:1)

Image 01: print file (in Rhino, to scale)
Image 02A: print file in GF (scale for ref)
Image 02B: print file in GF
Image 03: the result

As you can see, in GF the left side of the image appears to be SUPER tight to the edge, however, when it printed it resulted in a 3/4" offset (left hand side). Is there any way to ensure the bed image accurately reflects the material (i.e. to scale)?

Thank you!




First of all, welcome to the forum. If you always create your ‘artboard’ in the same size…20" x 12", it will always load into the GFUI at the proper size. Your created file is too large for the bed.

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You may want to run through the First Prints section of the support.glowforge.com site, since you seem to be misunderstanding some things about how the :glowforge: works! In the case of the bed size, hopefully this helps:

/uploads/db6859/optimized/3X/6/4/64aa0d5f3006252c589ba8009403f1a738aa6d45_2_690x396.jpeg

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I’m sorry for the trouble when trying to set up a project in the app. It looks like you’ve already received some great information from our other community members. Thanks folks!

To build on what they’ve shared so far, your Glowforge bed can accommodate materials measuring 18 x 20.4” (45.72 x 51.816 cm). It has a maximum printable area of approximately 11″ (27.94 cm) deep and 19.5″ (49.53 cm) wide, and it’s reduced somewhat when the laser operates at high speed, as it can take space for the laser to decelerate.

This means not all of the bed is displayed, or available to be printed on, so there will always be about an inch of space on the left and top of the material. This material can be reused as scrap later for small pieces. For example, a lot of customers use small pieces of scrap to print these pins available in the free laser design section: https://community.glowforge.com/t/honeycomb-bed-holdown-pins/18652

Please let our team know if this information helps!

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Your material is likelyshown to scale, it just isn’t showing the entire sheet since there’s a portion that can never be seen as the others have outlined. The other thing that affects the camera view is “set focus”, using that tool will give you the most accurate view for placing your artwork. It’s under the 3 dots and how to use is covered in the First Three Prints tutorials.

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Thanks everyone! Really appreciate the quick replies!

Looks like I was getting tripped up on the 1" vertical + 1" horizontal sections not showing in the bed image — @deirdrebeth (very helpful diagram, thank you!).

This all makes sense and thank you all so much for helping. Onward!

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It’s wonderful to hear that the information helped! I’ll go ahead and close this topic. If you run into trouble again, or have any questions for our team, please reach out and we’ll be happy to assist you.