Oh great! Thank for the information. I can’t wait to receive this machine. I am still not sure where to put it but by the end of next month, I will have it all figured out.
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had to pick a few things up at HD and as I didn’t have the pickup, just grabbed a 2ft x 4ft sheet of the .125" hardboard, was around 5 bucks or so, cheap for testing things out 
best cut so far seems around 300 speed, full power, 3x (2x doesn’t always make it through, might try 250). 200 speed 2x chars more than 300 speed, 3x.
smoke/smell wasn’t too bad.
engraves quite nicely, but is obviously quite dark.
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Thanks for posting this, I just got the medium silver mirror acrylic scrap package for $22, and it weighs 8.8 lbs! There was a handful of pieces almost too small to be used, but a good 50% are pieces that I can probably get a 3" x 3" size out of. If you are making small things or jewelry, this is a great bargain!
Has anyone tried TAP Plastic yet? They carry a variety of acrylic sheets. They’ll cut it for you with their laser cutter, but it’s a $100 fee for any new design last time I looked. The physical stores are pretty common here on the West Coast, which is why I ask.
There’s also a place called The Plastic Store in Torrance, CA if you’re looking for acrylic to pick up without having to order on-line.
I have my GF still sitting in it’s box in my living room. Another machine came earlier and took it’s place so now I have to find a place to put it where it won’t make the hubs mad.
What type of design?? Thats pretty pricey!
Evidently the folks in Denver gather as a pack like wolves when their remnants sales happen.
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Anything they haven’t already made themselves. It was odd I wanted something they already had, but in neon pink instead of clear and they said the set up fee for that was $100 plus materials. But if they did it once, any other copies would be about $25. That was about six or seven years ago, and I was dead broke so it wasn’t feasible for me. now i can make my own funky table to display my robot dolls on!
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Two more possible places…
Woodcraft stores might be a good source of wood, possibly even scraps. There’s stores all over, including one about five minutes from me.
This etsy shop sells fashion weight leathers that are vegetable tanned. One of the things I wanted to do with this laser was use it to cut out my doll clothes. Tracing all the pattern pieces and cutting them each out of leather is really time consuming and for me, physically painful because of tendinitis. So finding a fashion weight leather I can use in the machine is crucial for me… and all these pantsless dolls sitting around. My plan is to pay out to get one of the pelts to try out, if it doesn’t work I’ll for sure use it for something else. I’m just sad that the leather I HAVE is all chrome dyed. Or pleather.
the GF is going in the dining room where I can keep an eye on it and there’s nothing flammable(the lab has a lot of paints, glues, fabric in it, no need to take chances!) and someone else said the chrome dyed leather might give off carcinogens when laser cut… so I don’t want to take the chance of introducing them into my dining room! So even if it’s fashion weight and super thin… not going to risk it!
they have foiled vegetable tanned leather… that’s probably not safe in the laser either but it’s so pretty.
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Not free, but fairly cheap and very easy https://www.officedepot.com/a/products/519254/Office-Depot-Brand-Corrugated-Sheets-20/ is a box of 50 sheets of cardboard, 12x20. Great for alignment guides, etc.
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12x20…like it was made for Glowforge!
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Dadgummit…another $50.
Fifty bucks, fifty bucks, fifty bucks…
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Better than the GF store - there it’s a hundred bucks, a hundred bucks, a hundred bucks 
I never leave there under a hundred bucks spent.
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I did once, by about $2, and then I was kicking the living daylights out of myself for missing out on the free shipping. Chuckle! 
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even cheaper:
no idea about shipping, though.
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Couple bucks cheaper when you factor in shipping. (To here, anyway.)
I did the =100 once. That hurts. Free shipping is “over $100”.
What was worse was I had forgotten one thing and had to go back and buy that separately (so I spent another $90 on top of that too 
).
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How I feel about filling up my beast and reloading my Starbucks Card.
bahahha
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From Office Depot, 50 sheets of 12x20 cardboard were $28, free shipping. Fastpack was cheaper ($11), but charged a lot for shipping ($17 to Florida), so the price worked out about the same.
fair point. the shipping gets more reasonable per piece as you add more, but none of us would likely use the volume it would take to make it significantly cheaper.
Yeah, free shipping makes a huge difference for laser materials. Reminds me of 3d printer filament - the shipping can be 1/2 the cost of the material, unless you buy through Amazon Prime or some other source with free shipping.
Proofgrade’s pricing is actually pretty reasonable, if you buy over $100 at a time and get free shipping. And, of course, things work magically well.
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