Dispatches from the front (Pre-Release Report) - the ugly

LOL. If we do it I’ll definitely let everybody know.
First thing’s first… need me a 'forge. :slight_smile:

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I like ugly. This is great.

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I’d watch. :slight_smile:

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It is indeed my hope that owning a GlowForge will help reduce (a little) how often I have to run to the hardware store to hunt for some weird part.
Thanks for the story and pics!

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I have a 3D printer as well but before
Glowforge my options would have been running back to the store or creating a model for either 3D printing or the other laser. That would have required measurements, fiddling with the model, fiddling with the machine (especially if I decided to 3D print it), running it for the 2 parts I needed and then do the install. All of a sudden, an hour roundtrip to pick up the other casters wouldn’t have seemed like such a big deal.

The scan & trace function is more useful than I expected.

And it’s reminding me that I could have done it before - I have a flatbed scanner. Just never occurred to me to do that before. I’d always start with creating a new model in software. :slight_smile:

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I actually do this with 3D printed parts too. I don’t know which CAD package you normally use, but for instance I made a bezel for the airspeed indicator for my father’s Cessna and basically took a ruler and stuck it above and took a cellphone photo, brought it in as the background of the sketch in OnShape, and scaled the image to the right size, and simply traced above it (I could have used AI to trace it->DXF->import as well). It only took a couple of minutes. I was off by a fraction of a mm (turned out to have a very subtle fillet that I couldn’t see but on V2 brought a micrometer)

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Yeah, I could do that with the scanner - just put something on the bed and punch the button and I did what you described last year when I was trying to get a very specific wave pattern for an LED light base I was working with, but the GF workflow is just that much less complicated to make me consider using it more. It seems to have reached one of those simplicity tipping points that makes it a method to add to the toolbox vs knowing it’s available but not bothering to use it because it’s easier (or more likely, just more comfortable) to fall back on the tried and true manual methods.

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