Fortnight of Lasing

So I have had my Forge for about two weeks now and I wanted to share some initial thoughts, my setup, and the projects I have made so far.

A few initial thoughts:
• The mix of functional and visual design aspects makes this a beautiful piece of equipment.
• It is a little louder than I expected but not so much that it causes any issues.
• I was a little disappointed at the fact that there is essentially no image editing in the software (yes I know its beta).
• I was also disappointed at how few items there are in the Catalog. Is there a plan to allow users to add to the Catalog?
• There should be an option for disabling the air assist, or at least organize the order of operations from back to front to avoid re-depositing debris into freshly engraved areas. This is of particular interest for plastics.
• There should be an ability to duplicate an existing project.
• When copy & pasting items in the software, these items should show up as separate artwork that can have different settings applied to them.
• When changing the status of a piece of artwork to “ignore”, the settings which were applied to that item should not be reset when changing back from ignore to engrave/cut.

Setup:
I went back and forth with which workbench/table to go with and saw many options used by others on the forum. But I landed on this one from Amazon. It ended up being the perfect height for me to be able to access the work area without having to bend down. It only had one drawer and since I did not intend to use the underside, it was wasted space. But rather than buying a flimsy plastic storage bin, I decided to build in drawers to utilize the most area available. I wanted to be able to store 24” material as it’s the standard size for a lot of material I buy. So each drawer is approximately 24x36 inside dimensions.

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Projects made so far:

Founder’s Ruler
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Amp Faceplates
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Button Badge
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LED Lit Glasses Stand
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Cutting Board
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My current solution for >1/2” thick material.
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Case badge for my drone.
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Cool specs stand! :grinning:

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I may not be understanding what your meaning is on these 3, but my take on these are as follows:

  1. you can organize the order of operations by dragging the pieces of your project up and down on the menu at the left side, it cuts them in order from top to bottom.

  2. you can duplicate an existing project in 2 ways that i can think of (but more if you do it first in illustrator or software of your choice). Draw a box around your project in the app and ctrl-c, ctrl-v to copy paste. If that’s not what you meant, the project saves on the GF project page with settings intact, you just have to click on it.

  3. copy and pasting into the software - the GF isnt made to be a graphics program (at least not yet, maybe someday?) You have to distinguish what you want separate from each other in the graphics program of choice.

I don’t know if i shed any light on this at all, or if i answered something other than what you were intending. Hopefully this helped in some way.

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Great progress so far

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Thanks @ousniper

  1. I don’t mean the order of artwork on the left. I mean currently it always starts engraving at the front of bed and engraves towards the rear, but in some cases would be beneficial to start at the rear and engrave forward.
  2. I’ll give it a try but does it also copy the settings? I didn’t think it would.
  3. I don’t mean copying into the software, I mean copy and pasting while in the software. Currently this creates the second set of items but they are treated as clones of the original and cannot have separate settings applied to them.
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Yeah, nice… i get what you were meaning then.

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Favorite glasses ever came from Accent on Vision! :sunglasses:

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Wow, what a really stellar array of projects! I really like your riser solution; the flat pack aspect is what appeals to me. And those drawers you built are the bomb!

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You are really going to town GF. I got the same table from Amazon and the height is perfect for me also,

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B074WL437T/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

I was lazy and went to Ikea and got their Alex set of draws. it has 6 draws measuring 23-1/2 by 16-3/4 inside.

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Based on what we’ve seen so far, this isn’t just because it’s in beta. It seems that glowforge is resisting making GFUI anything more than the “slicer”/renderer/nester for the unit, and I agree with the decision. There are many, many fully featured options for image and vector editing, GFUI doesn’t need to be one of them. There are, however, many features and improvements that GF needs and should implement on the software side and I’m sure we will see them roll out in the coming years.

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Love your risers, what a great idea. Would you be willing to post the svg for those?

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i agree, GF has never implied there would be image editing software in their interface. and, as far as i know, that’s not common in any laser cutter software.

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Nice work!
Just a tip, if you get that 90 degree kink out of your vent tube the machine will breathe better.
Nice outside finish on the window.

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Your stand and drawers look perfect! Excellent work! Some great projects!

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Sure, I need to tweak the fit a little first and then I’ll share.

I understand and I’m not expecting this to turn into photoshop but was expecting some basics like dimensional position, horizontal/vertical flipping etc. I have figured out my workflow from Illustrator to GF and its only a few seconds to make changes so it’s not a huge deal, was just surprising.

Thanks. The picture is a little misleading. I was excited to finally get some pictures of the setup and didn’t quite get it all put back to where it was before working on the drawers. Normally it’s not like that but thanks for reminding me.

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You’re so kind. I was educated that it’s not forum etiquette to request files- apologies as I’m new to this and didn’t mean to offend! Just thought it was a nifty solution to a common problem.

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No worries at all. I’m usually open with sharing files of stuff I make for myself. The customer projects are a different story.

But anything I make for the machine to enhance its function I plan to share when the files are ready. This is a great community and believe working together we can make some incredible stuff.

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Great start. Stay lasering my friend

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