The company enabled sensors that monitor the air assist fan just recently. So I never had the magnet problem until maybe 10 days ago.
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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?
That was happening to me also ,and than I saw the Head Fan Clean Error. That solved it for me, had to use the Air blower on it.
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.
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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.
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Ditto everything you said. I tested the magnet theory by taping the wood down with Gorilla tape instead of the magnets…no air assist fan stopping.
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…
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I think they were thinking maybe you would prefer not to burn your house down if the air assist quit working. 
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That is what the pause would accomplish to get your attention to the matter.
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!
If a fire was actually going on, pause would be way worse than killing the print, since the fans continue to run under pause.
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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
Well I guess that is a problem then, since my fans continued to run and the head stayed over the work area when it killed the print all five times it killed the print. It mimicked what a pause would do except there was no way to continue the job. The only options were to open the lid or to press the cancel button on the error window, then the head would return home then shut the fans off.
I will continue to use magnets. I had wasted way too much material in the early days with material moving ever so slightly ruining long print jobs, when I did not use magnets. With large prints on wood for pictures I thought I could get away without using magnets back then, but it would shift slightly during the 1 to 2 hours it was engraving and the whole picture would be ruined. The same thing always happened with smaller material on quick prints.
I’m glad you resolved it!
Here is the design @GrooveStranger mentioned:
I’m going to close this thread. If you run into any other trouble, please start a new topic, or email us at support@glowforge.com. We’re here to help!