Cannot enter material height >.5"

[adam.pitzer]

I’ve been trying to cut some material larger than .5" but when I go to enter the material height it won’t allow me to enter in anything larger than .5". Is there a sensor that detects the removal of the crumb tray that isn’t working? how are you supposed to work with materials over .5" if you cannot enter it in?

[Houdini7]

The laser arm would hit material taller than 1/2"
1/2" is the max height

If you want to work on material taller than that, you need to remove the crumb tray and build risers to lift your material up to a height that the laser can engrave.

e.g. you need to enter a value that accounts for the delta in height NOT the material height once you remove the tray

[adam.pitzer]

This is with the crumb tray removed and I had it lifted up so that the top of it is above where the top of the crumb tray would have been.

Thanks. So then is the material height the “height above where the crumb tray would be”? How does that compare to the focus height?

[Jules]

Tutorials here for how to do it:

Tutorial: How to cut without the Crumb Tray (Honeycomb)

Tutorial: How to cut objects too thick to have the honeycomb in place The GlowForge has a maximum material thickness it can cut through, but there is a maximum thickness you can even put on the honeycomb (crumb tray) even if you are surface engraving as the laser has a limited focus range of 0.01" - 0.4" *** above the surface of the honeycomb at the time of this tutorial. But let’s say you wanted to engrave something thicker that fits quite nicely inside the GlowForge but not with the crumb tray…

Cutting Without the Crumb Tray - The NO MATH Edition

There’s a great tutorial here on cutting without the crumb tray when you want to work with thicker material. If you want to know the numbers and theory behind it, go read that first, and then come back. Thank you, @henryhbk! This method uses the digital calipers you should already have, and the not-used-often-enough ZERO button. We’re going to go through the steps from the tutorial above, but without any math or writing down numbers. The first step is to find the height of your crumb tray’s su…

Tray Removed - Calculator - Updated

After seeing a couple of people talking about the correct way to do this I made a calculator to simplify the process and hopefully demonstrate the goal. All you need to do is add the height of your object and the base you want to use and it will tell you if it will work or not and the setting to use in the GF, if it won’t work it will tell you why. If you don’t have a base in mind just put 0 and it will give you the minimum needed. [image] Zip file TrayCalculator3.xlsx (33.8 KB) Dropbox in …

[Houdini7]

I was hoping Jules was still awake to post those

[adam.pitzer]

Thanks,

I found some of those but somehow not the first one. I could not for the life of me understand the others but the first one got it through.

[Jules]

I guess I probably am the only one who can find them easily since I put the Matrix together.

[BSheremeto]

one point, the laser arm doesn’t actually hit above .5" but the air assist fan “scoop” at the back does

[timjedwards]

I now ALWAYS test for this in tight situations by turning off the machine and moving the head around by hand.

[pip]

Thanks for the answer @Jules. I’m going to close this thread - if you have any other questions, go ahead and post a new topic.