UPS delivered today. They had given a 3 pm - 7 pm delivery window, but it arrived at 10 a.m. Thankfully my wife was home to sign for it. I woulda been rather upset if I had to wait another excruciating day because they didn’t hit their delivery window.
But I can’t complain, because I skipped off from work after lunch to get Gary set up. Setup was a breeze, even after taking time to read the safety precautions. I got stuck on calibrating, but a quick forum search, a little bit of manual head nudging, and I was back on track.
First prints are never the most exciting to read about and mine are no different, but its still quite exciting to watch your machine make something really cool out of raw materials. Started out with The founder’s ruler on proofgrade maple hardwood.
I really only wanted to use proofgrade for the first try. After that I knew I’d just be playing around and didn’t want to burn my good material. I had sanded and finished a single side of 3 12x12 Baltic birch plywood pieces. Having only finished one side they warped pretty badly (moisture flow being sealed only on one side means that side doesn’t expand or contract as much as the other). So I decided to burn through some of those. I didn’t bother masking because I have a large roll of transfer tape coming and didn’t want to burn a bunch of painter’s tape on just messing around prints. Another catalog item in the pen carousel.
And then a dragon from the folks at makecnc.com. The file came in for 6mm or 1/4 inch. I just did a 50% scale on it, and everything fit my 1/8 in plywood great. When I do a more complicated one, I’ll go in and add some engraved details for scales and whatnot.
He’s standing on a piece of cardboard where I tried to cut out the pen carousel using some cardboard settings posted on this forum. YMMV holds true here as it didn’t completely cut all the way through for me. I should also mention that with the warped wood, parts of the cut were being elevated off the bed. I was concerned about alignment and focus. Neither proved to be an issue. In fact, on one part of the cut, it made some interior cuts, followed by the exterior cut. So the inner pieces fell down flat onto the bed and then the rest of the piece was cut free to fall on top of them. I thought it may get stuck, but it fell directly into place around the already cut pieces.
My last bit of fooling around was just grabbing some icons from the noun project and cutting them into some of the scrap cutouts from the pen carousel. These are 15mm in diameter. The pictures don’t show the detail here but I was amazed. Particularly with the alligator. I tried to get a better shot but my phone won’t focus in tight enough. I’ll get some better pictures next time with my DSLR. I almost didn’t post this picture, but figured it’s better than nothing. The two that didn’t come out great were very detailed and scaled down way to small. I didn’t really expect them to work out, but wanted to push the machine.
Overall, I’m very happy. That said, this is very much a beta product. The inability to reliably position cuts and engraves is severely limiting. I know people recommend the jig method, but the entire selling point of this laser is to NOT need to do that sort of tinkering. But with the knowledge that the positioning will be addressed, this is an impressive laser. I’m already enjoying the jealousy of my friends. I can’t wait to start printing some of my own designs up next. This will be my last update on this thread as the intention was to catalog the timing of the final leg of my Glowforge delivery. This is really just the beginning of my Glowforge journey, and I’ll continue to share with the awesome community here.
For those of you still waiting here’s a big picture of what my timeline looked like (taking delivery in WA):
Received golden email on estimated date.
1 week later I received shipping notification for proofgrade materials.
1 week and 1 day later I received the proofgrade box
2 more days and the Glowforge showed up in UPS my choice scheduled for delivery in 2 days.
2 days later, ups updates my status indicating an error in sorting (only one box made it out of CA) delaying my shipment by a day.
The next day (today) I received Gary.
Thanks to all who followed along my journey with me!