I am on my FOURTH Aura as of today. It cut twice and then went haywire. I now can’t do anything until Monday to wait and call support which will have me take the same pictures I always do and then be told I have to return the laser and wait for a new one. They won’t do anything else. As I said, this is my 4th Aura and the longest one has lasted is 2 months and this one lasted less than two hours.
You can’t get your money back after investing close to 2k on the machine and the filter. They won’t let you apply it towards an upgrade on another Glowforge.
I am ready to get on ALL of the private and public art groups I am in and tell everyone to NOT WASTE their money.
It will be interesting to see what the company says on Monday. SO FRUSTRATED…
I have seen where abuse by shipping (one’s local UPS) keeps damaging machine after nachine ( the big machines are heavy and clumsy in the boxes, and amazing any survive after rolling them end over end so even the many “fragile this side up” signs are worn off) but as they leave the factory they are indistinguishable. Thousands of folks are very happy with their machines and don’t have issues but you are so lucky to get four in a row.
I was lucky like that with my 6K pro, but was trying to figure out what I was doing that was causing the problems. In the end I discovered that the strong magnets field messed with all the electrons buzzing about in the printer head. Solidly obvious once the solution was known, but never part of a report in discussing the problem. When the machine was exchanged 11.5 months into the year’s warranty it was pretty damaged, but mostly by teaching me things I shouldn’t do. I could have taken several machines to learn, but wanted to solve what turned out to be the magnet problem first.
This group is pretty amazing at helping folk work through problems. I have a pro, so an Aura is pretty different, but many have Aura style and many have both types that can be a lot of help if you let them.
I feel your frustration 100%! bought my glowforge aura last week and have spent too many hours trying to figure out why it won’t just cut 4 simple rectangles! I am not doing anything intricate - just rectangles. It will cut 2 or 3 just fine and then it does this weird cut thing - ugh it is so frustrating. I put in an email to support - but so far crickets…Oh and all the material wasted! UGH! So far my opinion of the Glowforge Aura is that it sucks .
Depending on the material you are using is likely getting debris on the track. Hopefully you’re already wiping them before you start every job. At this point, why not just cut 3 at a time? Or pick a material with less debris?
Support has a phone number you can call 7 days a week to get an instant answer.
With almost all of us (and folks with any other technical machines) our roughest time is when we first start using it. Keeping the machine clean in the right places, and not frying chips in the wrong ones is one of the earliest challenges with any laser (even the ones for $200K).
Learn on the smaller simpler things. It is harder to figure out one thing giving a problem than a mixture of several issues. You can learn plenty from making smaller things even out of big things that did not work.
Almost all my coasters have engraving on the reverse side. If one side is messed up I can slap some cork on it and use the better side up.