Nothing that hasn't been done before

Yeah… I figured you’d say that. And I’m very happy for you and the others who aren’t having the alignment issues that I do.

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I just did a bunch of "I was stolen from Mrs Hatch’s desk! " pencils for my wife. School started today and she said some of the other folks were already thinking up projects for me :slight_smile:

I used @marmak3261’s pencil jig but altered it to fit an Amazon Basic yellow pencil and 3/16" foam core instead of cardboard.

Doing a pile of them for the local MakerFaire.

I like your coaster. I may steal the inspiration :slight_smile:

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Customized pencils for the kids’ first day of school will have to become a tradition when the forge finally arrives. Wish I had it for last Wednesday when our oldest had her first day of kindergarten. Bravo.

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Sorry… didn’t mean to add fuel to your fire. I haven’t done enough to understand the parameters. It worked well for a single pencil directly under the camera, on one evening. And after I shimmed up the corner and got the lid straight and the machine almost perfectly level. I can’t say if any of those are variables or if I just lucked into one that was calibrated on a Monday.

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I was watching your live video… and then remembered I need to eat :sweat_smile:

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Heh. Of course it’s not you! Honestly I’m really really happy yours is working the way it’s supposed to! Driving me a little insane that mine’s not. I know the pleasure of having proper accuracy from my 1st unit and anything less makes me… I’m going to stop talking now.

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Laser all things!! :grinning:

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So which direction is the phrase on the pencils? Once they get sharpened enough, are they eventually going to say “I was stolen” or “Mrs Hatch’s desk!”

I’m hoping that they will eventually just say that they were stolen :smiley:

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I don’t know who you people are who have managed to hold on to a pencil long enough to lose a significant portion of it to sharpening.

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woodworking tends to chew up pencils in no time. When you are marking on unsanded wood all the time, it’s like writing on sandpaper. I’ll go through an entire box of #2 pencils in about 2 months of lots of woodworking.

Also, you have to keep them sharp so you can be more accurate in your marks, so even if the tip is “good enough” for paper work, it might still be sharpened for more accuracy on the wood itself. So yeah, LOTS of waste on pencils

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Ah, woodworking. I have to admit, I probably haven’t used a pencil in anger since grade school. And I was that kid who was forever losing things.

Now, several many decades later, I have become quite adept at not losing things, but I also have no use for writing instruments, so I’ve still never managed to use up a pencil or go through all the ink in a pen.

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hahaha I was the “scavenger” of pens and pencils in school. If you dropped a pen or pencil, and I came across it, it was mine. I always ended up with more (and sometimes MUCH Better) pens and pencils than I started the year with. I never needed to purchase new pens and pencils cause I had a good fistful at any given time. The mostly used up pencils were great for a number of things, but my favorite was pulling the eraser off, whittling a little notch, and using them as projectiles.

We were NOT safety conscious in school. Pencils, paperclips, bent metal were all valid projectiles. The only thing that was banned was a rolled up paperback workbook that was duct taped at the end and fired using surgical tubing. In the initial tests, it flew across the gym, hit the upper wall and at the point of impact it was STILL rising. We all looked at it and determined for ourselves that it was not permissible for us to fire it at another human. Figured it would take a head clean off if you hit someone squarely.

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I am the same way. I don’t use them quite as fast as you do with my woodworking, but they do need sharpening often.

Is that an Ikea trivet? I picked up 3 of them last Friday when I was there buying my GF table.
Don’t have any plan for them but figured they’re cheep and laserable, how could I pass them up.

Ha! I always kept my pencils as long as they would still write. Most teachers would give me funny looks because I was using something like this. image

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I think so. They are indeed cheap, and I live right near an Ikea. It’s hard to resist.

How do you still have that much eraser?!

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Hi Tom,
Your comments have me worried. I have assumed that the alignment of the machine was tied to the bed camera, and I have seen a few comments stating that the lid is warped or the side rails are… or comments that the “fisheye” wide angle distorts towards the edges. Do you know how much misalignment you have? I was planning on running a test. I have a wide format injet printer, I thought I would print a radiating pattern of simple shapes using the printer and a ruler to set scale. I would print it and then use the trace to see how well the machine duplicates the expected lines/shape.
I was hoping to quantify the distortion. I may have missed it has Glowforge output an expected distortion range?
-D

Yes, this is a good test. You don’t really need the wide format printer. Just grab a sheet of cheap cardboard, draw some random shapes or test patterns all over it, then:

–put the cardboard in the Forge
–read the test patterns with the lid camera
–select those that fall within the printable region of the bed
–engrave the test patterns lightly, right back on the same piece of cardboard (without moving it).

Your alignment accuracy will be directly measurable: the distance between the drawn test patterns and the engraved ones on the sheet of cardboard.

There have been numerous examples of this having been done to demonstrate poor alignment. Lately, some people on this forum have claimed that the problem may not be as widespread as the reports tend to indicate. I urge those of you with good alignment to post counter-examples to the poor alignment cases we keep seeing. I’d really like to see how good it can get. Maybe in a new topic, “My Alignment is Working!”

Edit: I took the lead in doing this. The new topic is here.

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Yep. That’s how it runs - from the eraser end down. I had some other things I thought about doing but they created issues as the pencil was sharpened and it’s a Catholic school :slight_smile:

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