Honestly, your experience in particular is making me very worried about my forge - I appreciate reading everything you’re posting and you have every right to be angry. I cannot imagine how frustrating this roller coaster has been for you. Is support on a line with you? Because … they should be.
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Just got to try some cuts and engraves today. This has to be a software thing, everything I did was pretty much bang on
I can’t think of other reasons why the cut would be perfectly aligned one day and then way off the next, then fine again.
Seems like something that I would hope will settle down once they settle down in development.
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Does that mean that another machine has made it out into the world? If so, congrats! 
Not quite, it means daddy finally got time to play with the forge again lol
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Yeah this thing is MESSED… UP!
What in the 7 hells happened in the lower-right?! I was sitting there watching it engrave and my jaw dropped. From that point on, it was SO far off the mark. The lower-left one was the 1st one it decided to engrave. Next was the lower of the lower-right ones. All downhill from there.
I’m FED UP!
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How tall are the magnets? Is it possible it hit one or got attracted to it?
Otherwise it looks like your steppers are losing steps or a pulley is loose on its motor shaft.
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0.11"
And here’s one just drop center. Off like I saw the day before yesterday. This thing is just defective. I think I’ve proven that out enough now. Now to go convince Support (again). But I’ll do that some other time. It’s after 04:00 and I’ve got to be at work1 at 07:00, so…
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This is the worst alignment I’ve seen so far. If it’s over 1/4", GF should send you a replacement.
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If they do that will be his fourth production machine. I hope they sort this out before international shipments! That would be 7 shipments at ~ $500 each. More than the cost of the GF.
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So is this just visually off on the screen, or are the cross hairs not how you placed them in the design software? That is, if you put a rectangle around them all would they be in the locations you placed them in your design software?
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I’m pretty sure they will. I mean… As you can imagine, this can’t be used in any practical way. At least not in any relatively-painless way. The kids have little projects they want to do in the meantime, so I’ll suffer it for them for now.
The latter. The purple/pink is where I placed them, and, well, you can see where they actually ended up.
For example, on my cardboard sheet above, the one middle left was specifically chosen so it would not cross the line to its left. But, as you see, it did. Center was chosen because it should my drop dead accurate because it sits directly beneath the camera. But, as you can see, it’s off by ~0.5".
This week is a weird one for me. Those most-recent tests were done from 03:00-04:00 this morning after I got home from work2 and before I arrived at work1. Tonight I’ll be stopping home for a minute around 17:00, then I’ll be back again around 12:00 at which point I’ll approach Support about my current findings. I’m sure they’re sick of me at this point, but I hope this helps the future of Glowforges and Glowforgers everywhere.
I regret saying this. It was 04:00 and I was exhausted and frustrated. 5 hours later and that’s still true, but it was an immediate outburst at the time in response to what I was seeing. So please allow me to rephrase… I’m fed up with this unit and I look forward to my earliest opportunity to give Support the chance to rectify this for me. TO BE CLEAR, Support has not been informed of my recent alignment issues, so they haven’t had the opportunity to address it.
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Tom, some thoughts based upon my experiences and don’t take any of this in a negative way please.
If I get frustrated like this, and I have. I step away and give it a rest. Especially since you are working a lot and cannot give this the attention you would like.
The one constant here is you. Multiple machines, etc etc. There are two scenarios that I see.
- there is a legitimate issue with the machines
- You have a mental block and are doing something wrong and you cannot see it, so you are doing the same thing over and over without realizing it.
It would be interesting to hear back from Glowforge about the machine that was returned. I doubt if they will, but I would love to know if they can replicate your problem back at the factory. This would confirm which of scenarios is happening.
Most of my prints involve artwork and a complete cutout around the perimeter. If I get the cut on the sheet, then minor alignment issues are not apparent to me. If you cut these type of projects with the kids then everyone gets something with less stress.
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Here’s another option to consider, @Tom_A. If you are comfortable sharing your GF with another owner, you might want to reach out to someone who has done calibration tests on their own GF (maybe @takitus or @karaelena perhaps).
They can run a calibration test in the way that they’ve done successfully on their machines and it will also prove if you are doing something wrong (doubt that very much), or if it truly is a machine specific thing (more likely in my opinion).
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If you look at the bottom right corner you can see it engraved half a target and then did the rest further left. I don’t see how that can be anything @Tom_A is doing wrong unless his magnets are strong to stop the head moving.
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completely agree with you on that one. That particular one is completely on the machine.
I was trying to add some more value to @buschtrent’s post and give another alternative.
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It looks like the machine skips steps so that explains why it is different every time, and why it is so far out.
Some machines seem to have an offset that corrects again. That looks like the same problem but less severe. Some have a smaller constant offset which seems different.
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Agreed, I was just thinking the same thing. Might be a problem with the stepper motor driver or something loose. Doesn’t feel like something that can be fixed by software, with the possible exception of a chance to the motion profile or if the motor driver voltage is software-adjustable. But those things shouldn’t vary much between machines.
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Not taking anything as negative. But I’m not doing anything wrong. I got very used to my first machine, very quickly. When you do something repeatedly and all of a sudden get a new result, it really sticks out. So when I’ve dropped dozens of objects center-bed and had it nail the target every time, it was immediately obvious when that didn’t happen.
I did that a couple of weeks ago with a couple of fellow users. Their results are what we’d all agree are what we’d expect at this time. Almost perfectly on-target. Basically, the opposite of what I get. 
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