Print size

[buschtrent]

I made a print to take advantage of the 10.5"x 20.4" print area (or so I thought).

Notice the ruler across the top of the UI. It clearly shows 20" as the max width of print area. I know Dan told us 20.4" was available. When I looked up the specs on the Glowforge website, it says 20". Notice how my print lost the S and D.

I am kind of confused as to if my memory is bad, or they changed the width back to 20" .

FYI, I am cutting HPL with .006" kerf compensation in my Autocad software and it is coming out well. I hope to show the finished piece this week sometime.
Thoughts?

[Clone]

the bugger areas are still being played with I think mine right now is only 19.5 x 11.5 for cut and 19x11 for engrave or something like that

don’t quote me somone may no better then I

[Tom_A]

@Clone

only 19.5 x 11.5 for cut and 19x11 for engrave or something like that

From Glowforge Production Features & Specifications (01-Jun-2017):

The material rests on a 20” x 18” working bed. The printable area is software limited to 18.5” x 10”. The maximum thickness of material with tray installed is 0.5”; the maximum thickness of material with the tray removed is 2”. The focus range is 0.5”.

When the laser is moving at maximum speed, it needs room to slow down near the top, bottom, and both sides. We’ll be updating the software to compensate for that so it can give you more working space - up to 20" x 11.5" for slow movements like cuts; less for faster motions like engraves.

[Clone]

for cut I am seeing 19.5x11

and engave looks to bee 18.25 x 11

[buschtrent]

We’ve made some small but important changes to the planned bed area of 12x20, and it’s a mix of good and bad news. The bed area is wider and deeper than we planned (18" x 20.4") and we can accommodate thicker materials than planned (up to 2" with the tray removed instead of the 1.5" planned). However, our production units will have 11.5 x 20.4" working area, which is more width but less depth than planned. Also, the working area will be reduced somewhat when the laser operates at high speed,
…
Back in March, this is what was said.

[Clone]

fully agree with the quote you found, just hope that the restrictions that we see (my print screens) are only soft limits and not o no we had to shrink it again

[marmak3261]

Check out the screen shots in this post. It shows a framing square and gives a visual of the difference from cut and engrave at the moment and what is possible.

Framing Square Sized for Engravable Area

[FrameSquareEngrave] I had never gotten around to redoing this for when the bigger area got pushed. One of the challenges is that if you only cut and score, you could do a inch wider. Edit and Addition: I thought some folks would like to have the outer numbers converge on the corner and 0,0 is in top left corner if you use acrylic and print in reverse so that you flip it over and numbers and ticks are on the bottom. That way you avoid parallax in measurement. [CommonOriginFrameSquareEngrave] …

Know that you can address the 19.5 size for cutting even if you have an engraving in GFUI. As long as the engraving itself lies within the go zone of the bed. So you can cut out a bigger area than you can engrave all in the same operation. One way to insure that you are getting everything is to make sure all the objects get the color highlight when you click on them in the GFUI after you do the settings. If they don’t light up, they are no going to be processed.

[Rita]

The Glowforge Basic bed can accommodate materials measuring 18” x 20”. Your Glowforge can currently print up to 19.5 x 11 in. Engravings take extra room to speed up and slow down, so the area may be a bit smaller. We’re working on software improvements that will increase the printable area.