Hello lovely GF community. I am having a problem and after looking at the forums, i am not alone with this issue. I turned on the GF, and as it is doing its warm up ritual, the laser won{t slide to the right. It starts to, then appears to get stuck, and i get that ´Head not found´ issue. I cleaned, took the belt off, checked all the connections, and manually move the laser back and forth with no problems. I followed the things in the other forums that were suggested when this issued occurred for other people but no luck. I have only used it a couple of times, so I´m so sad right now. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
The belt could be loose, or the slide to tighten the belt has not been tightened properly? You could still move the head back and forth (with the machine turned off!!) but the machine might not be able to do so. Posting photos taken with a cell phone looking up at the belt could tell a lot.
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thank you. The belt was very tight initially. And i loosened it a bit, but it didn’t help. Then i tightened it back up and it doesn’t seem to have made a difference. I saw in other forums that the head should slide pretty easily when the machine is off.
I would try and get the photos of the bottom and also what you can get around the area on the far left side, especially where you can not see with your eyes. The post that and others may see what another could not. Otherwise you will have to wait for support to look at your logs,
Thanks. I do think it’s a motor thing, but i’m ready to go through that process. I took a video and pics of all the things so i will add those too. I appreciate your time.
I personally wouldn’t go loosening things etc. That the head is moving is a positive. The camera takes a bed picture and tries to identify the head. It then sends a move command to try and move the head under the camera (in the middle).
Material on the bed with cutouts can interfere with this process. So can overhead lighting, or sunlight coming into the machine (can mess with the exposure of the image and/or cast shadows that are misidentified as the head).
Are either of those situations true? Have you tried eliminating those by removing used material and reducing light? Have you tried moving the head directly underneath the camera and then powering on the system?
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I second that suggestion.
Hi @carynbrooks76. I’m sorry to hear that you’ve been running into some trouble with the error message indicating that the printer head was not found. I extracted the log files of your Glowforge and saw it was having trouble during the calibration stages of prints. During this stage, the lid camera will try to locate the printer head as it move across the laser arm. I saw you tried some troubleshooting already, and were going to post a video of what you’re noticing when your Glowforge is trying to calibrate. Feel free to post that in this thread to help me review that.
In the meantime, I have some further troubleshooting suggestions. Some of this you may already tried, but I wanted to include them to confirm:
Turn off your Glowforge
Use a lint free cloth to wipe down the top of the printer head
Remove all material from the crumb tray
Check that the carriage plate is installed correctly with the teeth on the belt pointing to the inside. You can follow these instructions to clean and check Carriage Plate.
Once you’ve had a chance to perform these troubleshooting steps, turn on your Glowforge and let it try the calibration again. If you are still having trouble, let me know.
I’ll look forward to hearing how it goes.
Thank you for the reply. I did all of these steps and it’s no better.
If there are steps i can take to talk to someone i think that’s where i’m at now.
thank you for all the suggestions. I had to loosen the belt because the wheel was flush to the side and i could not get the belt off. i tried repositioning the thingy under the camera, and that did not help. I’ve checked all the “clips” and all the connections many times. I’ve emptied the crumb tray, told the glow forge (which is named Walter Mitty) how beautiful and useful it is. And how much i love it. I have read it adventure stories to get it in the mood to create things, and still nothing.
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Hi @carynbrooks76. Thank you for getting back to me with the updates. I received your emails for this issue as well, and just sent out a response. To avoid any potential confusion with multiple threads opened for the same issue, I am going to go ahead and close out this thread. I’ll look forward to your email response. Thank you!