First paying job for the Glowforge!

This is a sample holding tray for the dairy business. Made from .125" delren sheet and 1/4" delren tube. Complete with snap features for the marker holders.

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I’m making 10 of them.

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Wow, I’m impressed!

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Congratulations! :sunglasses:

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Apologies in advance if this is a rude question. May I ask how much you intend to charge for these? Also, how long did it take you to design this and what are the approximate material costs and production time per unit?

As we all receive our GlowForges, it would be helpful if we could compare notes on our approach to pricing.

Thanks!

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Very nice! I like the tubing, it makes a nice support with screws. :grinning:

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Pricing is hard. I was replicating a similar unit so the design was probably only an hour and a half. There is $30 in material (with some nice scrapes left over). Cut time was just under 20 min. and assembly is about 10. My shop rate is $75. I figure $2/min for laser time. I am charging the customer $95(there is a little padding in there). After talking to the customer I could have charged more, but that is how it goes. Looks like they will be ordering another 10 in a couple months.

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Thanks for the details. This is really helpful!

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Always round up to the half hour and have an hour minimum. Figure your cut time and your labor separately. Your labor can be figured at a different rate than laser time. (some jobs will cut fast but is heavy on assembly, others will take laser time like engraves, but will have little assembly.

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Nothing like the voice of experience. Thank you!

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Just be careful, if your customer orders 100 pieces, you’re gonna have a lot of layup you’re going to be doing. (maybe a nice problem to have) I’m in a related field and you’re probably right, you could have gotten twice that. Did you do the engineering too, or just the laser and assembly?

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I never worry about too much work if it pays well:-). There are always ways become more efficient at scale and that’s the fun part! It was pretty much all designed I just tweaked it a bit.

At a hundred pices I would contract out the laser cutting to a local shop with much bigger machines :slight_smile:

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Yes! That makes me so happy! This give me one more example to win arguments with naysayers.

Looks fantastic. I plan on using delrin quite a bit. What settings did you use for the cut if you don’t mind me asking?

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Full power, at 150 on a pro.

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Looks great–nice to hear about Forges paying for themselves, finally!

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