First time using the passthrough on my GF Pro

Problems and Support
#1

I’ve been working with my GF Pro now for three weeks and everything’s been fine (camera seems a bit out of focus but it doesn’t prevent me from using it). Today I decided to take the plunge and use the passthrough slot.

I have an item I’m interested in selling and being able to go from maxing out at 11 inches to 17 would be huge but it entails making use of the passthrough slot. My first attempt on a piece of 19" x 19" x 1/4" birch plywood worked out fine except that I thought I knew better than the computer about alignment. The picture didn’t look good do I aligned it myself and managed to be off by a 1/4". This piece required a second round of moving the material through the slot so this time I went with whatever the computer thought was right. And wouldn’t you know it - that worked great. So I took my imperfectly cut design to show the wife. We ate dinner then I went back and loaded up a second piece of plywood to try again. I didn’t close the browser or anything. Just deleted the existing design and reloaded it. Resized it to fit everything looked good. Sent the print off and it cut as expected. When finished I went through the prompts about moving my material 8 inches down. My piece has a lot of parts cut out which got caught on the crumb tray so I had to open the door, take the piece out, clean out the bits and put it back on the crumb tray and align it with the right lip. Closed the lid and then the browser said “Aligning don’t move the material or open the lid”. That’s fine. But it never got off of that. I also noticed it says Continue? and there’s a scan graphic running next to it. After awhile I clicked on the continue? but nothing happened. Suggestions?

#2

The passthrough alignment feature is in beta. Support can’t help you with it, you need to post in the ongoing beta discussion thread which the dev team monitors.

Here’s the standard response from support:

#3

I’m sorry you ran into trouble while using the Pro Passthrough feature. @eflyguy is correct that it’s currently in beta. I’ll be happy to take a look, however, and see if I might be able to offer some advice.

I located a print on the 13th which appears to match your description. After a section of a Pro Passthrough print runs, the system takes photos of the print result and uses them as a reference to align the next portion of the print. In the lid images I extracted from the logs, it looks like most of the cut out pieces from your print were removed before moving it. It may have been difficult for the system to align the next section as removing the pieces changed the way the material looks.

we recommend leaving at least 3 inches of the cut-outs from the previous print section in place. If you find that it’s hard to move the material through the slot, please try covering the area you’re moving through the slot with sturdy, thin material like cardstock before moving it through.

Will you please let me know if this information helps with your next Pro Passthrough print?

#4

Hi, Thanks for the reply! Yes I had to remove the item from the GF because when I tried to move it forward through the slot several of the small bits that were cut got caught on the crumb tray. Because of the size of the material I try to use the right lip of the crumb tray as a guide so when I put the material back in I made sure to put it up against the lip again. I can see if someone was cutting something that didn’t have a lot of details at most you’d probably have to do a little touch up sanding but what I want to cut has a lot of small swirls to it making sanding difficult. That item which was a large circle really with some details cut into it required two passes. The first one I thought was way off so I manually moved it and was way off when the cut continued. The final cut was just the top of the circle and I went with what the computer wanted to do which looked off to me but it came really close. Then I tried the same design without restarting the GF or the browser window. I got to the point where the GF wanted me to move the material forward which I did and then when I told it to continue I think it just sat there and said aligning and the scanning animation started up and never stopped.

#5

Thank you for the update. Did you happen to get a chance to try the advice regarding leaving cut-outs in place as well as using a material like cardstock to help move your material through the Pro Passthrough slot? If so, did the advice help to improve the experience when using Pro Passthrough?

#6

It’s been a little while since I’ve seen any replies on this thread so I’m going to close it. If you still need help with this please either start a new thread or email support@glowforge.com.

#7