Excellent perspective of experience. Thank you.
I will say the main gantry plates and frame components are from CNCconversion, main support plates for the gantry are 3/4" mic-6 cast Aluminum, this is not a sales pitch for them but, the plates are very well machined.
I do not have the equipment to do that machining, that is until I get this machine finished, should be able to manufacture any of the main parts on my machine.
Purchased many parts from Amazon, EBay, Factorymation, Misumi, and many trips to the local hardware store for bolts, nuts and washers. other than the main frame, there are no plans, decide what you think you want and find the parts to make it happen.
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You truncated my response. I have no doubt they the could get the information from each person and give them individually packaged set of free materials. Personally, I don’t think they should. I would much rather they focus on getting us our Glowforge’s instead of putting resources on this. But like I said, thats my personal opinion.
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Its something that could be outsourced rather easily. Backerkit does the same thing for kickstarters. I dont know how much it would cost them, but setup could be pretty easy. Just upload the options and let everyone pick from them. If they are outsourcing their material supply as well it could make things really easy. I think the biggest hassle of the whole process would be actually picking and packing the orders. I have no insight into their plans for that part of the business.
I have seen a video tour of the inventables warehouse and I feel it is going to be very similar to that. Wish I could find it again to post
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Found it! Its a pretty cool little tour. Im thinking this might be a lot like what the glowforge materials warehouse might be like
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OH GOD. At first glance, I thought the cartoon guy was picking his nose.
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@dan I wanted to add my support. True, I am disappointed by the news, but feel that if you didn’t expect some sort of a delay (that is life) then you are not living in the real world.
Too many people in life feel that the easy answer is always the best, when that is seldom true. It is those that make the right, although possibly the least popular decision, that truly make the world the best to live in. Thank you for being you.
I didn’t start looking for something like Glowforge until the beginning of Nov. My real disappointment is that I took too much time, praying, and soul searching, before I took the plunge, that I didn’t pull the trigger till mid Nov. I’d like to think I was part of the founder group, but I have always been initially cautions, and at the back of the group, so I guess I missed that boat. Not that I deserve anything for being late, but any possible recognition or maybe group label for being in the first 2-3 months.
Once again, thank you for being the leader you are.
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It amuses me that so many people apparently run businesses that are reliant on a non-existent machine that they probably hadn’t even heard of seven months ago.
“The Fortune 500 company I was going to start on July 1st, Usin’ A Glowforge, LLC is now nothing more than a pipe dream, and it’s all your fault!”
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Our plan is to make sure there’s a good choice of plans (you can purchase with your gift certificate) that go with materials (the we ship with your Glowforge) so you can absolutely start making stuff, either of your own designs or from the catalog, right away.
Exactly.
Cool hopper idea! cc @tony
We believe design has value, and it’s important not to undermine our creators (like you) by charging less for our stuff. We want to keep designs affordable, but priced well enough that people can generate income from their creativity.
We definitely want to enable users to submit to the catalog, although that may not be there from Day 1 with so much else to do.
It’s important to us, too. We want to make it easy to find wonderful things to create.
We make tradeoffs all the time of marketing (shooting cool videos) versus shipping. We err pretty heavily on the side of shipping.
Please note that the machine doesn’t stitch; it just makes the holes. There’s a brief shot of the woman sewing up the wallet in our promo video, for example.
Yes - the difference between shipping 10,000 orders, of which each one is different, and 10,000 orders, each of which is one of three SKUs, is big.
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I’ve no idea how you guys at GF plan to curate user-submitted designs but it would be extremely frustrating to purchase a said user-design that looks amazing but doesn’t work/assemble correctly/etc.
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I did miss that, thanks @jrnelson. Some comfort at least.
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I’m outer sure that when @szara wrote “stitching,” they meant separating the cut file into Glowforge-sized portions, cutting a section on the material, allowing the material to be moved through the pass-through slot, then automatically finding the old edge of the cut and aligning the next section of the cut file to it before cutting, to create a continuous design (i.e., connecting cuts, not literally stitching).
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I recently went to the ASHRAE winter conference convention in the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando (third time I’ve been to the center - it’s huge) and there were explicit “no photographs allowed” signs. That didn’t stop a certain demographic that I will not mention from going through and obviously taking surreptitious pictures of everything they could. they even had a section all to themselves of products they had created from said pictures - it was crazy. so very skillful and intelligent, but crazy
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@dan, by “stitching”, I meant (maybe a better word for it would be) overlapping a long engraving design onto a long piece that is fed through the slots (on the pro). Not stitching with thread or anything like that, silly!!?
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Just FYI: The Q&A the other day had a comment from Dan that said the pass through function are the last thing they will work on. All of the other functions between the Basic and Pro are the same and so it will be tackled last. (My paraphrasing). So there is no video to see or updates on that function. I know it was just one example of what you want to see.
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Dan, I have to say that I absolutely think that design has value - I wouldn’t have bought into your vision if I didn’t, since the design of the GF is really what sets it apart (I honestly don’t think you meant this in a snide way, but it sort of felt like it) - but this made my eyes roll pretty far back in my head. It’s really starting to feel like this is a give away the razor and charge extra for the blades (which isn’t really a criticism, just an observation).
It’s clearly a winning strategy - while I’ve never used one, I understand that those smart desktop cutters (the brand escapes me at the moment) are extremely popular, and unless I’m pretty far off my mark, I think they work on a similar basis.
I think it’s entirely possible to value design and still not charge a lot for it; while I know you haven’t set price points yet, I have a sinking suspicion that it’s going to be substantially more than I wish to pay (I don’t really plan on making money with this device; I bought it to make the occasional personal item).
[quote=“dan, post:525, topic:1908”] We want to keep designs affordable, but priced well enough that people can generate income from their creativity.
[/quote]
I do worry that our definitions of affordable are rather different.
Having sat and whined about it, however, I would add that I’d at least consider a subscription plan for access to all or most of a catalog, I just really despise constant fees whenever I want to investigate something.
As it is, I guess I’ll just roll my own for anything I want to laser, but that’s not too surprising.
There shouldn’t be any additional import fees on free gifts. They don’t increase the invoice value.
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Good point. Though that would require that the materials are not invoiced at all (or separately?). And we’re not sure how that will be handled yet.
Why not have people make money on the good designs, especially if those designs are used for products to sell? Its like saying here…I’ve bought your phone…why should I have to pay extra for quality apps?
Alot of time and effort goes into creating quality cut files…why should GF designers be any less worth than the public…
You dont have to use their designs either…you can do your own. So its different than that paper cutter where you have to buy their dies or you cant use it…
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I explicitly meant those designs provided by the company. I am 100% for end users to sell their work as they like. I know I don’t have to use them - I was pretty clear about that in my post. And some of those cutters support hooking up to your computer over USB, and letting you use your own designs, so I think it’s a reasonable comparison.