Just got my 3rd plus machine—first 2 died got refurbished…paid another $1125 for they said I was 4 days past warranty. Right out of box Amber light. I lost all my Christmas orders due to machine failure and now I am losing all of my Mother’s Day orders, Everything looks clean, nothing loose, It started to do first print and within 5 seconds, stopped, amber light. Turned everything off, restarted half and hour later, amber light immediately. Took off printhead reattached ribbon, checked belts, checked connections…did every check that they had me do with the other 2 that died, still not working.
if you hold down button does it change to teal?
see if you can set up the printer on wifi…
does that change anything?
Jonathan
It went to teal. set up wifi again, same issue … Amber light comes on immediately.
the first time I tried it did about 5 seconds of print then stopped. Now I can’t even get it to do 5 seconds. Goes straight to amber. And, thank you for responding, I’m at a loss.
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How’s the temp in the room it’s in?
71 at all times
just tried again. held till I got teal light. reconnected to wifi. said successful. message showed congratulations you can now go do dashboard, Went to dashboard light went from teal to amber immediately.
I did a quick search
try this:
thank you so much for helping me…checked all of it, everything looks good but doesn’t work…so frustrating that it looks so new but won’t work. So very frustrating that I put out another $1125 for another refurb that doesn’t work. 13 months, 3 machines, down time is unreal.
What’s really frustrating is that I am sitting here waiting on email back and forth, losing another full day, with questions that could be answered over the phone.
Unfortunately that’s the way it works with GF. Their biggest downfall is their lack of timely support. Sometimes you’ll get a response in short order and other times you wind up having to wait days. Good luck, but I’m betting they will have to send you another machine from the description you are giving.
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where are you located?
Jonathan
They just emailed me that they are going to have to send me another refurbished machine, and that it should be processed within 5 days. I am in Florida. This will make it 4 machines in 13 months. They said they were shocked that this happened, that it seems like an electrical issue inside machine.
What I’m real curious about, is who is doing the quality control on the refurbished machines? They said they no longer offer repairs, nor telephone support, so if they can’t offer repairs, who is putting together these refurbished ones?
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people who are paid $1.83 an hour, i assume from the quality of the stuff they have been shipping,
the QA person gets $2.00 an hour, it shows in their work.
Last rumor I heard was that they were taking repairs in-house. Offering repairs to the public, and refurbishing warranty returns, both involve repairing Glowforges, but that’s the entirety of the overlap.
Offering repairs to the public means you need to a facility able to directly accept machines for immediate repair somewhere, you need to be able to diagnose and offer quotes for the repair work up-front without doing too much labor (in case the customer rejects the quote). You need enough parts and labor on hand to offer a quick turnaround time on effecting the repairs once the quote is accepted. Once the work is done, you need the logistics in place to be able to ship the machine back to the correct customer. All this needs to be tied in with the customer support, order and fulfillment systems, so there’s multiple software engineering and process components that have to be in place as well.
Having refurbished machines on hand for warranty claims does not involve any of those things other than making repairs. They can pull return inventory from their outsourced warehouse at their leisure, when stock of refurbished machines drops to whatever minimum level they want to maintain. They can repair those machines as slow or as fast as they want, or as slow or as fast as labor and parts become available, and don’t need to know how much work or how long it will take up front. When the repairs are done, they can ship an entire truckload back to the fulfillment center, no individual carrier shipping has to be arranged. The only process integration necessary is updating inventory levels as machines and parts are pulled or put into stock.
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dan, YES - logistically its a better fit all around, BUT the quality of the refurbished units are TERRIBLE - it seems 5 out of 10 units shipped are bad / dirty / sloppy (now this is just from reading the forum and personal experiences, NOT a hard #) and when a person has a 3 month old pro the stops working, and they ship a 4 year old refurb that is HORRIBLE DIRTY SHAPE - that is a Major nagative for customer experience, Glowforge should REALLY be shipping people with new machines that break in < 6 months a NEW machine – IMHO
jonathan
man… that they no longer do phone support either now is another revelation. So they got rid of chat… forum support… and phone support. New for Summer '22… Glowforge support via carrier pigeon perhaps?
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I love my machine. It is just over a year old, and I have not had any issues except a broken wheel which was a quick and cheap fix…
I DREAD the day that something major happens. It’s not if, but when. That is true with everything. I dread it because of the absolutely HORRIBLE customer service I read about on a daily basis. and the horrible quality of refurb units I also read about daily.
I am already looking for alternatives. I am not sure if I will buy another or pay for a refurb. It just seems like a gamble.
I hate this because I absolutely LOVE my Glowforge. When it works, which mine has, it works great.
It seems like they simply don’t care about these issues. It will bankrupt them if they continue on with this lack of support and quality control. Which is sad for such a great product.
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I’ve had some major issues over the years, including needing both in-warranty and out-of-warranty replacements. The customer support I received was stellar in every case, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with my replacement machine. Even on BBB, Glowforge has only 30-something bad reviews out of 100K+ lasers shipped. For every bad story you read on the forum, there’s probably a thousand problem-less ones never told.
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