For Sale my Glowforge Pro with Air Filter.
I have the original box and it works perfectly.
I’m moving and just don’t have the space for it sadly, that I haven’t used it really in over a year.
Looking for $6000—->$4500—>$3750 for all plus actual freight.
Open to offer or local pick up in Orlando FL
Thanks!
Might be good to include how old it is
Was an original, bought the year they came out, I don’t remember when that was, maybe 5 years ago?
Then that would be closer to 7 or 8 years. I am one of the founders and had to give up my old basic only about 5 or 6 months ago and buy a new machine. My old one would have been 8 years old this coming August. It’s doubtful you can get anywhere close to your asking price, so perhaps see what new ones are selling for and come up with a lower price.
I second that – the tube on my original pro failed over two years ago. As I didn’t use the machine much, I was able to nurse it all along for a couple of months more, but ultimately, the machine had to be replaced as they do not offer tube replacements.
Duly noted and much appreciated, checked on purchase date and was May 2020. I have lowered the price significantly well within line of machines in this range.
Thanks all!
They cant replace the tube ? WOW I didn’t know that. but that is good to know when I have to replace mine . do you know if this is true for all laser?
Glowforge stated they would change them for a minimal cost when the product was announced and the first units shipped, but over time that was gradually phased out - to the point where the original posts here discussing it and FAQ statement were subsequently deleted. I had the wherewithal to take a screenshot on Dec 20, 2020, showing that statement.
That statement also said the tube was rated for two years, and a replacement “kit” would be available, but that never materialized either.
They can replace the tube, in fact that’s what they used to offer as a service and they guaranteed that it would be a $500 charge. They have since discontinued that policy and program. It’s faster, easier, and less expensive for you to ship them your machine and have them ship you a refurbished machine.
Notice I said less expensive, but it’s often not clear why it’s less expensive or for whom.
We can look at a couple of cases. It’s worth mentioning that I’m speculating a little bit here especially for analysis of Glowforge’s end of this deal. They’ve never really told us why they do things in general, but we can assume that everything they do is in service of keeping the business viable and making a little money — that’s the purpose of a company especially when they have investors like Glowforge does. They’re not a charity.
For Glowforge? Absolutely it’s less expensive. The problem here is logistics. If they support via refurbished machines they can have machines ready to go. They can cross ship them to you, which is better for customer service. There are fewer unexpected complications compared to what happens when they get a returned machine that has been modified or has secondary problems that they have to troubleshoot and fix while replacing the tube. This is all fixed by having a reserve of machines ready to be shipped back to customers, having slack in the system is key to keeping things moving smoothly. Queue theory in action.
For a business user? It’s much less expensive this way. Downtime is a huge problem and in the old model you would have to ship your machine to Glowforge, they would work on it for some period of time, and then they would ship it back to you. It would take upwards of about a month. Now with cross shipping your downtime could be two or three days depending on where you live. Try asking somebody who makes a living with their laser how much being down for 30 days in November would cost them. They’ll take cross shipping every time.
For a hobby user? Surprisingly I still think it’s less expensive. Out-of-pocket, yes you pay more than the original $500 price point for a tube replacement. However this doesn’t take into account that you’re effectively getting a new machine and the clock resets on all of the secondary problems you might have as well. It’s really hard to figure out the value of that, but if your tube is going chances are other components are starting to have some wear, especially moving parts. I can’t prove it exactly but I would suspect that it’s a net positive even if it cost you a little more out-of-pocket.
Don’t get me wrong it’s frustrating to deal with support and it’s frustrating that the refurbishment process is a black hole — they don’t price it per machine, there’s kind of blanket tiers of costs. Even with that I think that their current system is probably better for most users and it’s definitely more sustainable for them than what they were trying to do before.
If you really want to repair your machine and not ship yours to Glowforge you could always go with Wiregrass. You can search the forum for more info about them. There are cases where Wiregrass probably makes a lot of sense. For example if you have a pretty new machine that’s just out of warranty and you crack a wheel that isn’t user accessible, Wiregrass can probably help you out. Or in the case where you’ve modified your machine such as by cutting out the fan in the rear… Glowforge doesn’t want to deal with people‘s modified machines, and you may be ineligible for repairs in the first place. I don’t know if Wiregrass has the same policy.
Wiregrass also sells some repair kits so if you are feeling particularly handy and not afraid to dig into the internals of the machine, you might be able to repair whatever problem you have. This is particularly relevant in the case of a red wire short, as far as these things go it’s a fairly easy fix. It’s worth looking into depending on what your problem is.
And lastly you might be able to hire a local electronics expert for some hardware problems. I know someone in the UK who had the red wire problem fixed by a local electrician with a little coaching from me.
Anyway that’s probably more than you bargained for but there’s some context for you.
Actually the opposite is true. For most all consumer level CO2 lasers, the tube is both replaceable and relatively easily sourced from a wide variety of sources. GF’s tube is a non-standard design because it has to be shorter than a normal 40W CO2 laser tube since it is mounted on the gantry. The usual design has it fixed and so it can be nearly the entire width of the machine. So you can only get the tube from GF and they don’t sell it as a separate part.
Their initial claim that they would provide user replacements and their subsequent full replacement $499 service promises were integral to the decision of many to buy it because otherwise as we have discovered, it’s a virtually closed system with only one source for parts and service. Unlike Apple who has taken the same approach, GF isn’t organized to service customer machines so we end up needing to buy new machines at a “discount” or leave their ecosystem and go with something more open and cheaper. It’s like a Maserati - good machine under warranty but after that you’re just waiting for the event that will drain your wallet 
I have to respectfully disagree with this. The refurb may be newer or older than the problem machine. Yes they have gone over it and replaced parts that are broken but I don’t believe they replace every belt, wheel and wire that may be ready to break. Without some fairly sophisticated analysis you can’t tell if those parts are ready to suffer strain failures. Based on the number of DOA (& repeat DOA) units it suggests they don’t do that analysis (e.g. x-ray parts looking for strain effects) nor replace them preemptively.
It’s a moot issue anyway because the current approach is to sell you a new one at a discount because they’ve been “moving the repair operations” for the past couple of years and are unable to provide refurbs. For GF this is more profitable because they don’t need to provide repairs or refurbs because customers are continuing to buy the discounted machine and not running away en masse. Their target market doesn’t look at TCO or serviceability before purchasing - they’re looking at the catalog & purported ease of use in making their purchase decision. If XTool or OMTech or Gweike ever put a focus on creating a canned design library like GF’s catalog and advertised the heck out of it,GF would have no competitive advantage.
With equal respect:
Again, speculating here but I think they do. The refurb machines I have gotten have been spotless. My two experiences are anecdotal, so grain of salt and all that, but we can even use your counterpoint as evidence that they actually do replace the parts. You said:
I agree, this would be a lot to look at these parts, so why bother? A wheel is cheap. Cables are cheap. Belts are cheap. Fans are cheap. Just throw new ones on. Labor is expensive, so don’t make them think and slow down, just replace everything mechanical on every machine. Less training this way and people can just power through refurbs. It’s going to be less expensive on several levels to simply replace everything compared to heavy analysis.
I can’t directly counter this, as we have no official insight into failure rates. We know it’s nonzero but we suffer from failure bias. Nobody (or at least far fewer people) posts a rant about the great refurb they got, they – by far – come here to complain.
That said we can make a pretty strong case that the number of DOA units is small, because we know for sure that Glowforge, and by extension their repair partners, are motivated by continuing their existence. It’s really bad for them if their repair process is failing at high rates. We don’t know the structure of their contract with the repair partners, so it may not cost GF on a per-unit failure but I am willing to bet that GF leadership doesn’t like the optics of high failure rates. That’s why I think they take the issue seriously and have worked to keep the rate low.
We can also do some back of napkin math and see how it looks.
How often do we hear about DOA refurbs? Not even close to 2 per day, even with our failure bias effect on the forum, even back when the forum was far higher traffic. Let’s try to put a few numbers to it:
This is over 7 years. There are some problems with my method here. There is almost certainly overlap in my searches. None of this corrects for shipping issues, which we know are a significant contributor to these kinds of posts. People may have typoed or used alternate phrasing. People may be griping elsewhere. Even if we keep that in mind, these numbers don’t support the idea that there’s a major failure rate problem, especially since I hedged my estimates by a full 90%.
Also, we have to remember that failure rates are not consistent. Different support partners, global pandemic supply line effects, manufacturing defects per batch, etc. It gets complex quickly. Rather than trying to correct for all that we can just look at the downstream effects like I have here and I think it smooths out the variables.
Probably, both because of what you said and because we can’t really change any of these processes. It’s an interesting thought experiment though.