I don’t know about Canada, but the snake pits for any company getting started these days are quite stunning, I was doing artwork 50 years ago and the difficulties were nowhere near what they are today. The centralization and monopolization common today would get you jail time back then,
Making lasers and related efforts is hard enough. Making materials for lasers is a whole nother business. One can argue the wisdom of making sure a consistent material was available, but the reality of trying is more problems than I would want.
Other sources are available, and the company has a relationship with Inventables so you might find help for your needs there.
I appreciate your defense of glowforge but where they recommend using proofgrade materials over other materials I feel like they should make the effort to make those materials way more accessible to ALL of their customers.
The prices for the actual materials carry a premium price which I respect because those materials have to go through a QC process but the shipping charges just don’t make sense.
Not so much a defense as recognition of the reality. I totally hate it and would want those crimes still enforced (most are still on the books)
There has been a lot of discussion and even the ability to ship Glowforges to Canada was a nightmare you can still see documented in the older threads, much less the rest of the world.
It doesn’t make sense to order commodities that are manufactured everywhere in the world from the US. I found a few Canadian suppliers (or is that suppliers Canadien?) with a quick search. Acrylic is incredibly uniform, so, even if the thicknesses are different from Proofgrade, you’ll have a good set of settings after you run some tests.
High quality hardwood can be a bit harder to source (in any country), but I’m sure there’s just as much woodworking done in Canada as there is in the US. I’m sure you can find quality suppliers without paying international shipping charges.
Just wondering if we are running out of requests for ear savers? We’ve done over 140,000 - most coming from Glowforge. But the matches have slowed down a good bit the past 2 weeks.