Height of material that can be used?

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1

So my fellow glowforge users. This may be published somewhere, but what would be the height of material that will go on the glowforge? I have a job coming up but I don’t have my glowforge and I need to know if it isn’t possible to do this for my customer.

2

1.83" from the base with no crumb tray.

.433" from the top of the crumb tray

.5" if you’re really careful and the design doesn’t cause the air jet housing to hit the material.

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3

So is the reason the focal range is limited to .433" the fact that any higher hits the air assist duct?

4

I thought the GFUI would throw an error if more than 0.433" above the honeycomb? I must have misunderstood past posts.

5

It will until the S/W limit is changed. Doesn’t mean you can’t put a 0.5" piece in there. The focus will be lower but sometimes that is preferred.

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6

So you’re saying the GFUI won’t let you enter 0.5" for focus but it will still cut/engrave if the thickness sensor sees something that thick?

7

So far. As @rpegg noted it’s a s/w thing right now too. The s/w is going to need to be able to determine if the gantry will need to be in a position to have the duct hit the material or the head routing algorithm will need to account for it and adjust accordingly.

8

I’ve engraved/cut 0.5" material before. Entered 0.433" as the thickness. Engrave looked OK to me. May not have been as good as it could have been, didn’t compare it to the same engrave on thinner allowed stock. Cutting something that thick isn’t always pretty. Can’t think of any reason why my PRU would be different from a production machine in that respect.

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9

Yep, there’s about 4-5" of gantry movement between where the laser head is and the air assist vent thingy.

Meanwhile, I’ve found that sometimes I like the defocused results better. The optics on my machine give such a tiny spot that the results look a little “off”. (I could probably up the DPI for some things, but that would take a lot longer.) If the spot size is bigger the result looks smoother and nicer (usually). And there’s generally power to spare for engraves.

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