Does anyone in the Atlanta area know someone who can work on the Glowforge Pro?
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Welcome to the community. At this time, I don’t think anyone in here knows of any Glowforge repair people in the wild…as least not officially sanctioned to do repair work on them. What type of repair are you needing?
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What do you need repaired?
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My glowforge was only 13 months old, just 1 month out of warranty, when the orange light came on. It fires up, but that’s all. Glowforge (chat head) tech support tried everything, but nothing worked. They offered to exchange my machine for a refurbished one with a 90 day warranty for $1700. I spent $7000 for my original machine that only lasted 13 months, so why would I consider this offer? Sadly the machine was used very little the first year. At the most it was used 5 months for recreational purposes. According to Glowforge they don’t take laser machines in for repairs, yet they offered me a refurbished one. How’s that possible? Someone works on these machines. Thanks for your support.
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Their reasoning is that it is much quicker for the company to ship one that’s ready to go than repair that specific machine and return it to you. It is certainly quicker for you I think.
I recently got a refurbished unit and it looks new to me - I think that’s no guarantee that your experience will be the same from what I’ve read.
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If you are technically minded, it’s possible it’s repairable - it’s just not, per the lawyers, something Glowforge can tell you how to repair. There are folks out there who have figured out all the parts and, for those that are standard, what you can order to replace them.
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I’m definitely technically minded and repair most things myself when possible. Several months before the machine completely stopped working, the auto focus went out. Glowforge tech support couldn’t help me with that issue either. So, no one from Glowforge has been able to help me or point me in the right direction for repairs. Their final solution was to pay $1700 and exchange my relatively new machine for a refurbished one. Any repair suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Search in the forum for your specific issue. For example auto focus issues could be a number of things, but if it’s the cable:
Also there’s a wealth of documentation at OpenGlow even though it’s shut down (they tried to figure out a way to make the Glowforge work without the cloud, and eventually gave up).
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They tried to do the same to my wife. The issue turned out to be a bit of debris in the roller. (Use your brains!)
This is the SECOND machine from them. The first BRAND NEW one had the same issue as yours. The tech at the time said there were errors in the logs. fortunately my machine was just a couple of days out of warranty and this was while Glowforge was still new, up and coming so they sent a REFURBISHED machine to replace my NEW machine at their cost. Now it seems they no longer covering the $700 (350 each way) shipping and if you are out of warranty a refurbished machine will set you back at least $1500.
The techs don’t do much more than read the logs, ask you for pictures then the overall solution is to charge you and send you a used machine. and they have a REAL bad habit of sending the emails at the END of the day or the END of the week.
Of course the techs don’t. They can’t try to walk a random person though the inner workings of a machine! Remember their target audience is home users.
OTOH, they’ve always been happy to send out parts if they were available, and have never jumped in to stop the many many conversations on here about modding machines. Try doing that on an Apple-run forum 
BTW, the quoted price for the refurb does include shipping - unless something has changed in the last few months.
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