Shorter Glowforge Tray

[paintnwithfriends]

I score painting canvases with my Glowforge. I had been using a series of small blocks on the floor of the GF and they work fine, but are a bit cumberson to put in and take out as well as store. I came a cross an after market thinner tray hoping to use it with the GF in place of the thicker one. The problem is that the GF won’t register the darn thing… it dose it’s scan, but continually gives me a “thickness” error.

The tray fits on the floor of the GF and has a larger “grid” within it. My hopes is that GF makes a thin tray, or does anyone have any solutions? Put a painted black piece of metal below the tray perhaps… (that was my next thing to try)

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you in advance.

[dklgood]

Welcome to the forum.

The focus length of the Glowforge lens is 1/2", so items must be within 1/2" of the printhead for the lens to focus. Once you place items on your new tray, the items will be in range, but the tray will continue to be outside of the lens focus.

This post may be helpful to you. Updated grid for engraving without crumb tray

[pubultrastar]

Make sure you have this to ensure you’re in the right laserable zone for the laser:

No-Math Focus Ruler

Leveraging the recently-released Set Focus tool, I’ve designed a tool to help place materials when the crumb tray has been removed, no maths required. If your material is between the lines while resting on the bottom of your GF – not the crumb tray, you should be able to use Set Focus in the UI. If the top of your material is below the bottom line, use your favorite method (sheets of PG, tiles, 3-D printed stands, matching sets of trained hedgies, etc.) to elevate it and recheck. Repeat until …

For items that are thicker than .5", Iike thicker cutting boards, I use a jig that replaces the crumb tray.

Broke out the cutting board jig

I rarely use the Glowforge for larger items these days because I have a Mira 9, but that is being used currently for engraving water bottles and tumblers on the rotary. I needed to do a custom request for a housewarming gift, and since the cutting board I was using is too thick for on top of the crumb tray, I broke out my custom cutting board jig, which replaces the crumb tray. It places the board in the right focus zone, and allows me to get repeatable results on cutting boards, and thought I w…

If you have access to a 3D printer, I recommend these stand-offs / risers:

Glowforge Laser Cutter Risers by pegboyd

Hope this helps!

[dwardio]

In conjunction with the No-Math Focus Ruler, these supports can be cut from scrap materials in multiple heights…

Engraving Material Support Set (Painters' Pyramids)

[evansd2]

@dklgood

The focus length of the Glowforge lens is 1/2"

You can mess with this if you’re into math and experimentation.

Deep focusing the lens

So I had this idea for a while and finally got to it: an extension spacer for the lens so that you could engrave/score (or cut) the inside of a tray up to about 1” deep. Normally you are limited to trays no more than 0.5” deep because of the limited focal sweet spot of the Glowforge, but if you physically move the lens down and lie to the Glowforge about the height of your material, it will happily do the job. Here’s a quick makeshift “tray” that’s about 0.75" deep, a really shallow cardboard …

@michaeln just thought you might be curious from a product perspective. Feel free to use this idea however you like.

[michaeln]

Very cool! Thank you for sharing.

[eflyguy]

If you’re just engraving on the surface of something, just stack some unused material on the floor of the machine with the tray removed until the target surface is within range.