Yes to both, and there’s a way that you can expand the engravable area right now.
For cuts, the area is currently 11" x 19.463" (like @rpegg said, probably a touch of rounding in there).
For engraves, the printable area is smaller, because the head needs to have room to decelerate. The trick is, if you slow down the engraving speed (and reduce the power so you don’t char too deeply) you can expand the engravable area significantly. You can do that in the Manual settings. I do it quite a bit when I want to place something near the edges of the material to conserve it.
It’s not an ideal solution, but while we are waiting for them to finish tweaking the acceleration and expand the work area to as much as they are going to be able to eke out of it, it does allow for some expansion of the working area on engraves now.
Just one other thing I do… if I don’t want to spend a lot of additional time on slow engraves for a bed full of projects, I make the engraving for the ones closest to the edges a different color, ignore those for the bulk of the processing, and then go back in to pick those up with a slower speed on a second pass, and ignore the ones done at original speed during the second pass.
That gets a little bit more into advanced understanding of the settings and how they work, but it’s pretty quick to pick up. Shouldn’t take you long once you start playing with it a little bit.
Oh no - I’m sorry to hear you wound up in this situation.
We communicate carefully with each person who purchases a Glowforge. As a seller, that’s our responsibility. The person we sold your Glowforge to was informed exactly as to what he was getting, and confirmed with us that they wanted precisely that.
When you purchased from him, it was on him to tell you what he was selling to you. It appears, based on what you told me, that he didn’t. That’s a lousy position and it pains me to hear it.
This is a tough situation. He might have sold you a unit with a known defect - for example, he might have dented the metal grate by dropping a brick on it. He certainly sold you a unit that was different from the description on the website, in ways that he knew about, that it appeared he didn’t tell you about.
Since it sounds like we do not have a buyer/seller relationship, our assumptions about what we’ve communicated are wrong. I’m sorry for that too.
Our CS staff close issues when they’re answered. Since our answer was inadequate, you did the right thing to re-open it. I apologize for the feeling of frustration we caused, and appreciate your feedback.
Since you’d prefer to keep the discussion going, I’m going to move this to Everything Else.
