This last week and since the temperature upgrade firmware I have had 50% of all my jobs large or small fail. The head keeps pausing in the area next to the door on my Pro unit. Never does it anywhere else. Today at approx 10:45 the job failed once again. The room temp is around 65 deg and never been a problem until now. So I reran the same job without moving anything. Opened the lid and reran the job. The head paused in exactly the same spot.
When the laser first did this around Monday. I got the message to clean the head fan. I removed per instructions and the small and large fans are pretty clean. I did clean both fans and blow off along with the spring connector contacts. The same problem still existed on all remaining jobs after the fans cleaned.
My question is… If it was the fan then I would expect random failure and not to fail in the exact same spot!! This problem caused me to lose a lot of materials that are expensive. Until now I have never had a mechanical or electrical problem at all.
Do you happen to have strong magnets for holding down the material in the area? Others have stated that magnets caused them to get an air assist error.
Yep. Had a job stop in exactly the same spot twice. A magnet was directly below the air assist fan at that spot. I watched the air assist fan stop turning. Fortunately it started moving again after a couple seconds of pause. Think I got lucky.
I have used the same magnets for almost two years without an issue. I do not believe that a magnet was in that area or near the fan. However, good input and when it happens again I’ll see if the fan is stalled. Just seems a bit odd that after eighteen months or so that it is constantly happening just this week and never happened before??
Have you moved the head and gantry by hand with the machine off to its physical limits in X and Y just to make sure there are no physical barriers, obstacles or other problems?
rpeg… You are dead on… I was cutting another job this morning and BAM!! the head stopped and I could see the fan clearly and it stopped right over a magnet. I have used the same magnets since purchase of the GF. So the mod/update for sensing the fan just coast me around $60.00 of wasted and lost material. Bummer!!.
This one feature we could have done without. At least I know now so now have to figure out how to hold down slightly warped sheets which is most of all materials.
I think if the fan assist detection change GF should at least delay the stopping of the head for several inches so it would have time to clear the magnets and reset or something similar. It maybe just to sensitive the way it is
Thanks all for solving this… at least its not an electrical or mechanical issue which is a bonus.
The honeycomb pins, plans somewhere in the forum, are really really good for holding warped material down.
Magnets are still handy for tacking down lighter things that aren’t warped. I use magnets from old hard drives, which come on a mounting plate that appears to weaken the magnetic field on that side. I have not yet had a problem with them.
Agree that the fan monitoring would be better for us magnet users if it operated that way. I suspect that the company enabled the print stop because there had been a few reported cases where flare up ran the risk of becoming full blown disaster. But since I’m not invited to their development meetings it’s only an assumption.
If magnets are only placed on the front third of the bed you won’t run into the problem. The air assist fan is 5 inches behind the head.
My air assist fan went bad on my last GF, and it did exactly this. I know because I was watching it during cuts, and seeing it stop and start. The cuts didn’t stop immediately, so sometimes the fan was able to restart itself, but if it didn’t spin for a few seconds it would then error out.
I have had nothing but good things to say about my Glowforge for the last couple of years until this morning. I just spent two hours trying everything to get my Glowforge running , it kept stopping mid print because of a fan assist error. It turned out it might be magnets that I have been using since day one. My question is what were they (Team Glowforge) thinking when they implemented this fan error, why stop a print??? Just put an error detected on the screen, pause the print and ask if you would like to continue the print. Wasted material and time…GRRRRR…
Yeah, now that they’ve implemented the pause feature, hopefully they’re planning to go back and update the air assist monitoring with that instead of just stopping the print. Pause might not be as effective in preventing a fire as a full stop, though, so I dunno. We can hope!
My understanding is that the effect of the magnets on the air assist fan is an unfortunate side effect of the main intent of the change, which was to alert people who had their printer heads seated incorrectly, which could lead to a fire situation, since that let the fan run too slowly to blow the flames out of the way. Stopping the print is a safety measure.
Ugh! Just happened to me! I wasted several sheets of product until I saw this thread trying to troubleshoot. I really rely on my magnets. I desperately need a fix for this. stumped
