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. 
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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 
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