Hello!
Recently I pulled my Glowforge out of storage. The first snag I ran into was the glue had caused the front lip to come off, stripping one of the LED plug-ins. Replaced the part. Now it is running, connected to wifi, but when I go to cut it doesn't cut. Lenses seem clean enough to at least function, are we looking at a possible tube replacement?
Welcome to the forum.
Your post did not complete so we don’t know what you were going to say. Can you try again?
Thank you. I recently pulled my Glowoforge out of storage. It is not cutting (cardboard) whatsoever. Recently replaced the LED strips as the glue on the lip of the lid had failed and pulled it out. Now I am having trouble getting it to cut anything.
How old is the machine? Have you carefully cleaned all of the optics?
It’s the Basic model, at least a few years old. It’s not cutting at all, if there were ‘some’ cutting then I’d be quicker to blame the optics. The lens on the left seems to be used well, may or may not be worth replacing. I think this is a case about replacing the tubes, unless you can think of any troubleshooting methods. It has been at least one year since I’ve used it.
It would be a great help if you could show us pictures of the optics. There is one lens that focuses the beam, in the head. The others, one on the left side of the head and the one under the left side at the end of the gantry are windows. Collectively, they are the optics. If there is enough smoke deposit on the optics the heat from the laser can burn the deposit on the surfaces and block the laser beam.
The window under the left side is the one to get dirty first and needs cleaning most often. Hopefully, that would be the source of the problem.
You can drag and drop your picture(s) into your reply post.
It’s very unlikely to be the tube. Yes tubes age even when they’re not being used, but many of us are on year six, and a few well into year 7 with the original tubes with no signs of failure.
Pictures of a cut failure would help because it could be so many things, and pictures narrow it down.
Your lens could be in upside down.
Your optics could have tiny inclusions.
Your focus could be off.
Attempt a cut of the Gift of Good measure on any PG material you might have. Take pictures of the front/back and post them here. We’ll likely have ideas if not solutions.
“Replacing the tubes” will be of little help if that is not the problem. If those two windows are messed up there will not be much laser to make it to the material.
I can’t tell if that is a spot on the window or a reflection behind it. How does the lens in the head look?
Do you have the lens removal tool?
The lens is fuzzy at the least. Still not so bad that it cannot be cleaned by a Zeiss wipe.
I do not have a lens removal tool. I did check to see that ‘spot’ and it was only a reflection.
It is a reflection and the trouble is that it is not cutting whatsoever.
Do you have any calibration/diagnostics suggestions? The lenses don’t seem to me in any way to be dirty enough to interfere with the cut. There’s no cut whatsoever, could the lenses be out of sync?
There’s no cut to improve on.
Have you verified the laser is making it to the head? You can do that by putting a Post-It on the let side of the head and running a quick test cut with power set to 100 or Full. If it’s working you’ll see a tiny spot start to form & grow larger on the Post-It. Lift the lid then because a little flame is the next step.
If the Post-It doesn’t show any effect from the laser, do the same thing with the little mirror on the left side under the cover. If that burns but the head one doesn’t then the mirror is misaligned. If it doesn’t burn then there’s a problem with either the mirror alignment or the tube. It would have to be wildly askew to be that far out of line so it would be more likely the laser or the high-voltage output of the power supply is toast & time for a refurb.
I think that I understood you correctly, I tried the post-it (a plastic material vs. paper) on both ends of the mirror. I did not see it while it was on the moving head and there were no marks after placing it on the stationary head. Did not see any sort of light spot.
What do you know about the tube replacement?
They opted out of tube replacement…about 4 years ago? At this point if that’s what you need they’ll likely offer you a replacement unit (which is guaranteed for a short period of time in case you get a dud) for around $1700.
Might be time to reach out to Support (they have a phone number now!) and see what they can see on the logs.
