Magnets on the bed of the Glowforge

I cut everything from Felt, to Leather, to Wood Veneer. Would I be able to use magnets to hold down my materials without it affects the laser head? Or will it cause Electromagnetic interference?

I want to use small but strong magnets to hold everything down flat and solid.

Many many people do this. I don’t think I’ve seen any definitive reports of it causing trouble.

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magnets are awesome. i rarely cut anything w/o a few magnets holding position or edges down.

mostly i use magnets i took out of a bunch of old hard drives. those things work great.

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I am using fairly strong neodymium bar magnets with no issues so far. They are strong enough that I have wrapped them with gaff tape flags to make picking them up easier. I am sure there are other people here doing something similar.

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Entire thread about this:

What to do with them once you have em?

Alternatives?

Potential Magnet pitfalls?

Another alternative? Do more with magnets?

Short discussion that led to magnets?

I suppose what I’m saying is that searching here for “magnets” will yield a lot of content. Like so:
https://community.glowforge.com/search?q=magnets

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I was using magnets with no issues.

These holddowns designed by @eljefe4 are fantastic though. I’ve been using them a lot.

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That’s exactly what I use. I have a few different sizes of magnets but lately I’ve mostly been using these big ones: (I also keep some smaller round ones handy for when I need to fit them into small spaces.)
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B072K5SLXK/

And I too wrap them in gaffer tape. Teal gaffer tape, because Glowforge. :slight_smile: That not only makes them much easier to pull apart but also keeps them from breaking as easily when they inevitably jump a foot to snap back together.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B075RF86ZR/

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