Lens tube broken?

I am getting a little tired. :smile:

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I checked out your other thread where you were having issues cutting through proofgrade draftboard. Did you ever get that solved? They said your machine was measuring the material height as higher than it should have been for proofgrade draftboard. That would seem to suggest your material was warped or there is some other focusing issue behind both of these problems.

Never resolved. All of my stock is flat and held down with magnets.

I just did a test print thingy. Fidelity is good, but no where near cut through. Proofgrade walnut ply, proof settings.

When you clean the windows, do you clean the hidden one on the left side of the machine, and the one on the left side of the printhead?

I was lazy after whining about the proofgrade settings earlier. Didn’t follow up as I should have.
As shown, still have the issue

Yes. Both.

Well, i only have one other suggestion, and that is to turn the machine off for thirty seconds and then try to print the GOGM again. Something might need to reset.

If that doesn’t work, you’ll need to hear from Support. They can actually see what is going on with the machine, and we’re just guessing.

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Follow up on that. I’m thinking they’ll replace your machine.

Just checking to see if you got the windows that @Jules meant. If you cleaned them all, you would have cleaned (all as if standing in front of machine facing it):

  1. window under left side above the belt like thing (aims toward lens assembly)
  2. window on left of print head
  3. lens itself
  4. two windows beside the lens (distance sensors)

You probably got them all, but wanted to be sure.

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Yep. Covered (or uncovered, rather).

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I was wrong on the oak. I have been using walnut ply.

And the mirror underneath the removeable lid on the head.

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Yep.

Okay, I had one other thought this morning…do you have a Basic or a Pro model? I would be interested in seeing what the settings are for the Proofgrade Walnut listed in the default settings. You said you were using 160 speed…is that with Full Power?

Pro. Full power. Sometimes I have to go to 155.

Yeah, okay. I run a Pro and 168/FP is the default on my version, so that is a little slower. When you slow it down to 155 though, you get full cut through?

Yes on the full cut.

Sidenote - I can’t tell you how much stock I have one through using the proofgrade settings. You can’t really tell if you have successfully cut through until you turn the wood over - and thusly messed up the registration. Took me too long to abandon the. PF settings.

Heheh! Wish I could tell you how much stock I’ve gone through in the learning process. Definitely in excess of $1000 worth by now. (You could probably ask Glowforge, they likely have records of it from the PRU days.) :smile:

Well, for now, I don’t think you have a problem with the lens or the printer head. If the laser isn’t cutting with enough power, the first thing to do is to check that everything has been cleaned- you now know what to look for, but it helps to just do a little maintenance clean once in a while to keep it from building up in the first place.

The other thing to check is to make sure that the material is completely flat. (I like to use the Honeycomb Pins - I’ve never had good enough results with magnets.)

It won’t hurt to keep using the 155 speed setting for your walnut ply. If the other Proofgrade settings aren’t cutting through either, you can lower the speed on those by five or ten points. I generally set my own speed and power settings for materials.

And even with that I still sometimes have something fail to cut through with the default settings. Doesn’t happen all the time, just once in a while. But I always pin my materials down, check them with a pick like one in this set to see if they cut through before removing the print. Then I can send a second cut if I need to, and I don’t lose as much material these days.

Support is going to need to look into anything else it might be from their end. So they might have some other tests for you to run, but hopefully this will let you get your client jobs finished in time.

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It will help. I am hoping support will take a look at this string. I am still concerned about proofgrade support.

BTW, my stock is flat and is in contact with the surface. I make sure of that. I will try the pegs though. Always looking to improve.

Thanks @Jules