My Glowforge Set Focus has stopped working as of Friday. I have been in touch with support but I’m hoping to flag down some additional resources from Glowforge here, as the support person seems to have jumped to asking me to shell out $500 for a new printer head even though I have not been given any sort of reason and they said everything looks good based on the pictures I sent.
I am hesitant to spend money on a new printer head when I haven’t even been informed of a specific error, or anything from the logs suggesting the printer head is bad.
Older threads reference others having this issue and also having it fixed via something Glowforge did on their end.
Is there someone at Glowforge who can assist and possibly look into whether my issue can be solved in the same way? Or at the very least attempted to be solved this way?
Sorry you’re having such problems. All of us here in the forum are just other owners / users. There may be a few here who can give you suggestions, otherwise you’ll have to depend on the actual support team. Best of luck and welcome to the community.
Try a new browser. Mine was doing this for a week during the downtime issue they had. Turned it on yesterday and happened again in chrome but now is working in edge.
They do now and then but this forum is just for user feedback, it’s just those with some spare time and willingness.
Support doesn’t just make stuff up, they likely had already reviewed the logs and determined the error(s) were related to the print head. It would be nice if they told you what the errors were, but most owners are not technical people.
Ditto to what others said, but I’d also take a close look at the two windows on the bottom of the head and look for smudges. If you see anything on the inside they can be pulled out, but they’d need to be glued back in once clean, so hopefully not.
I don’t think support makes stuff up, nor is this post meant to be critical so please don’t project that energy onto this thread. I think like most support they have a set of steps they go through to diagnose a problem and then they have a solution they are allowed to recommend. I am still trying to get more details because the answer I got was that my pictures of the print head looked good but since it’s not setting focus they would replace it for $500 - that’s a little vague for me to just immediately say yes to.
I brought it here simply because myself (and others) have machines that have not gone back to normal after the outage, we are all having the same problem, and based on some historic posts it appears that others have come here and ended up getting some sort of software push/fix on the backend (even after posters insisted they just needed to clean it, etc). If support doesn’t really monitor this forum anymore, ok, I haven’t been a heavy poster here and they looked like they were pretty active in prior years.
It’s probably the cleanest it’s been since I bought it. I had no idea there was a cloud issue at first so it got the most thorough cleaning ever while I was trying to fix it initially.
There is also a great video on YouTube with a printhead tear down - I’d be hesitant to pry those windows out and re-glue, I’d worry about breaking them; the one time I had to get behind the lenses I used the teardown tutorial and found it fairly easy to follow if you are somewhat handy/tech savvy.
