Maybe not better but it seems to me it’s about time we had a thread for ideas that were Easier/quicker/better/more fun with a Glowforge.
For my submission and with full respect for the artist, yesterday’s google doodle. In case you missed it:
Probably no speed increase to the stop motion animation but easier and maybe faster on the cutting hands.
OK, I’m being a smarty pants, but:
anything you’d do with any other 40w CO2 laser! 
Faster than cutting with a silhouette cameo too! And I suspect the glowforge will allow for much finer detail. And maybe be quieter.
This probably sounds sort of silly, but I’m a terrible measurer. I’m excited to stick something in the glowforge, resize my design to the right size to fit it, and then take it out and put in the material I’m cutting. I like to make paper cut out book light things, and the glowforge is going to allow me to make them much faster with way fewer steps. I have, like, 3 or 4 ideas of how to make them with the glowforge, so I’m really excited to experiment.
If only the glowforge could solder for me…
yeah but the cameo will safely cut vinyl.
I plan to see if I can recreate some Charlie Harper paintings . Very well defined colours and lines
Doesn’t sound silly to me; I’m also a terrible measurer. I’m quite good with all of the math and the planning, but once it’s putting materials to the saw, things start creeping and then it’s a constant game of adjusting to compensate for mistakes. It’s made worse because my dad suffers the same problem, so any project we work on together is doomed to start getting wonky on us.
I designed my current desk (quite cleverly, if I do say so myself) so that it could be built entirely out of a single piece of plywood. I mapped it out on paper, accounted for kerfs, and even mocked it up in sketchup to verify my design. And yet after all of that, it ended up a quarter inch lower than I’d intended because I couldn’t successfully cut my desk legs the same length on the first try. (headdesk)
So the more I can take myself out of the actual production process, the better.
By the topic label alone, I’ll post this here, since it is another project that could be done so much more efficiently with a Glowforge.
Neat!
…now how do I get my Glowforge to do all that soldering?
Challenge accepted.
(when i get one…)
I think that’s in the defocused laser applications thread, though solder might be the same problem as other metals for rapid heat dissipation, maybe we need a pick n place adaptor on the glowforge head, and then typical surface mount/oven style run?