Is this something you guys have on the schedule? I would love to be able to do certain things in my glowforge that are a little out of reach with the fan on
2 Likes
Can you clarify that you mean here? The question is not clear…
Are you trying to cut material that is so light it floats around w/ the fan on?
If so, search the forums for folks who have tried different options to stick paper to heavier materials to get the job done.
If you are thinking about the air assist fan, you can use tape on the intake side of the fan to either reduce the flow or block it, just be wary of flair ups.
3 Likes
When engraving acrylic, if you turn off air assist it doesn’t stain up adjacent areas with vaporized material. This would save my tons of time weeding masking.
Engraving wood also in some cases is much easier without air assist. Saves a lot of time in cleanup.
Also the lighter material issue which can’t always be solved by weighing things down, but I’m less concerned here.
Yeah that’s not a bad idea, I might use it in the meantime to avoid long cleanup times. It does mean I will have to run separate engrave and cuts though. I think that’s still a timesaver over weeding 1000 pieces of masking per piece
1 Like
without the air assist, you will need to be far more careful when engraving/cutting (fire) and will probably need to clean the lens more often. neither are show stoppers, but both are important things to keep in mind. we can turn on/off the air assist on our universal at work, and more importantly have a focused cone around the laser that pushes the air straight down (which helps even more with cleaning).
our other offices with the same machine that don’t use the same focused air assist do a lot more cleaning when working on acrylic, in particular. we clean far less often and it’s rarely anywhere near as dirty when we do.
3 Likes
Yeah, definitely something to keep in mind. The glowforge does have a small fan near the lens to prevent smoke from rising straight up into it, but I’ve never tested it without the buffer fan running.
I’m just desperately trying to find a way to prevent long post-processing time on simple acrylic engraves.
I’m also attempting to replicate thick engraved lines on acrylic with defocused scores instead which has also been a bit tricky
Got it! I was confused as well because there are a lot of fans in your Glowforge. 
For future reference, Problems & Support is the best place for feature requests to get hopperized.
1 Like
I would like the option for the opposite. I would like to be able to manually turn on the main exhaust fan whenever I want. Sometimes, especially after cutting acrylic, I’d like to vent the unit a little longer.
1 Like
So I’ve been wondering about the following trick: How about a super-low-power engrave of a white or mostly-white jpeg/png image added to the job? It could be calibrated to run the fan for some known extra length of time without firing the laser (much).
1 Like
You can buy an inline booster really cheaply on amazon and have a separate switch for it
2 Likes
This topic was automatically closed 32 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.