I can only speak for myself, but a company that produced and launched a product with the help of a community and supports that product as best it can for a few years now, should understand how important getting replacement parts out the door is for a known issue.
A week ago, my GF was running just fine. Literally I opened the door pulled out the piece, put new material in, closed the door and the camera stopped working, therefore rendering the entire GF inoperable.
Did a little bit of research here and submitted a tech request, both came back with “replace the black lid cable”. Ordered the cable (plus white lid cable), on August 2nd.
I placed my order, the transaction went through, and I made a safe assumption that the cables would ship in a reasonable amount of time. It will be a week tomorrow since the order was placed and the cables have not shipped. How difficult is it to ship two cables?
In addition, having expedited shipping so I can get the GF back up and running (if this solves the problem) would be awesome, I feel that may be asking too much.
To be honest, I am more than disappointed, you guys do make a good product, it is a shame timely support is lacking.
Well, I’m sorry to add to your already noticeable disappointment, but this is now a community forum of just other owners. Support no longer monitors any of the posts here. Hopefully, you have sent them an email with this information.
Parts for the Glowforge come from a different location, so it’s not really surprising that they can take a bit of time to arrive to you. August 2 was only 6 days ago…and two of those days were over a weekend. We don’t get Amazon type of instant gratification in cases like this.
I hope your parts arrive soon…try to be patient.
I am sorry for your frustration. Many of us that are lucky enough to have owned a Glowforge for longer than the warranty period have spare parts on hand in case we need them. I may never need the spare cables, wheels, and optics that I have, but having them gives me a little security. Perhaps your experience will encourage other forum participants to order and maintain an inventory of replaceable parts. I hope your cables arrive soon.
I suspect the real issue is one of having the cables in stock. The old “just-in-time” concept was always skating blindfolded on thin ice, and the new “just-in-case” concept is exacerbating the failures of the earlier situation. Perhaps “just-have-patience” is the new watchword. The good news in that future is happy surprises when things arrive sooner than expected, but that future is not now.
I understand you are probably waiting at your email for support and might have missed these emails to provide such support. There has not been any comment back to attempt for your support post in a while. Would you still like assistance to getting back online quickly? Or was the post unintentionally one of those “posts you therapeutically type out but not actually intent to post”?
If you have even limited Internet on your phone you might be able to have an email address that would go around Comcast though that would create its own hassels.
You’ve convinced me to get a set of spares. I thought I read that the wheels are actually sets of 2, but the web site does not clearly state that. Can anyone confirm?
Well, after several emails to Tech, got my cable shipped on Aug 9th, arrived Aug11. Plugged it in and it fixed the problem. GF is back up and running.
Couple things, the other cable I ordered was out of stock, no indication or email on that, that could have held up the order. GF should be able to indicate when something is in stock or not before ordering.
Ill reiterate, for something that is a known problem with the machine, having this cable in stock and ready to ship the same day or day after an order should become regular business practice.
I have a spare of each part that is known to break. It’s best practice for a business to have spares. If you are using your machine for business then you might want to have an extra black lid cable on hand.
If the Glowforge carries the part, it is one that should be kept on hand. V-Wheels, pulley wheels, lens, mirror, side windows, belts, lid cable, camera cable. If you can wait for a spare part without damaging a business you don’t need to have everything on hand. - in my opinion.