That sounds like a great fundraiser.
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Wow lots of neat stuff posted here!
@printolaser I am single, never been married, and no prospects at the moment so I have plenty of time to focus/obsess. 
Yes, the chassis and suspension components are all carbon fiber composite. Well, the whole thing, everything you see that’s black except for the wheels and tires are all CF composite. Yes, lithium iron phosphate cells for energy storage, mounted in the chassis tub underneath the floor which has not been built yet - you can see a small section of the pack under the seats in the photo above
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Wow! Yes, you do!
Metal - melting, annealing, pulling, rolling / fiber - spinning, textiles / screen printing, letter pressing… The forge is going to provide you with yet another avenue of creativity to venture down!
Being new to lasers I am anxious to join you on that journey with all its lessons - an experience that I would not have the chance at if it weren’t for the price point on the Glowforge.
Besides the entry price, how awesome is it that our own hand drawn art can be dropped into it and exicuted from that?!
Thank you for sharing with us!
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Very impressive. Did you lay all of that fiber yourself?
You do have a distinct advantage in that there is no spouse to vie for the time that your project requires, and you can choose to ignore little tasks without being reminded how good you are at spending your time where you shouldn’t.
My wife of 37 years is practiced at helping me “find” that balance!: zipper_mouth: - and helping me avoid places I should not let me go…
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Yes, I laid up all the carbon fiber myself. It’s all one-off, moldless style building using carved/shaped foam as the primary form to build around.
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I was wondering what it was made of. This is amazing.
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How was the design accomplished?
Man, you have a lot of blood invested in that. See the light at the end yet?
My creative output has been pretty small for a few years, but here are a few things I have made.
My wife (who does book arts) and I collaborated on this little house library of family pictures for my mother’s 80th birthday. It is all fabricated in brass with a magnifier (so she can see the tiny pictures).
I occasionally make lamps from the junk pile. This one was for my brother-in-law’s 50th (there is a pattern here).
My wife is essentially the only person I still make jewelry for. These are all anniversary or birthday presents (surprise). My favorite is the working fabricated silver “clippy”. She collects vintage paper clips, and document clips, and other stationary related items.
Most of my time these days is spent on shop projects like cleaning the new/old printing press. For the last year or so I have been slowly rescraping my 1940’s knee mill to better than factory accuracy. It is a crazy thing to do, but so far the results are great. This pic is the ways on bottom of the table. I love the pattern the scraping makes on the cast iron.
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There is some incredible work in this thread. I can’t wait to see how you all make use of your Glowforges!
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I absolutely LOVE your sense of design. My husband and I made jewelry long ago, maybe I can find and photograph a few pieces. I particularly like the little picture house and the chain and the ring in silver. Thanks for sharing them.
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I’m a product designer/entrepreneur, and after years of working on interesting projects with some pretty big companies (Apple, HP, Nike, GM…), I decided to start my own environmentally-progressive radio company, Vers. Very rewarding, but we always seemed to always be at the mercy of our below-average manufacturers in China:
After a wildly successful Kickstarter project with Vers, I decides to start a second company with my then 15 year old son; we work exclusively within 100 miles of our Saxonville, MA HQ… the Onehundred name stuck.
We seek out interesting local manufacturing talent, design something simple that fits their skills, tools & experience and and then launch it on Kickstarter - we’ve since run 9 successful projects …it’s been a blast working with my son, and a joy knowing I’m employing my neighbors:
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How does Glowforge fit in? Well - prototyping for sure, maybe some custom packaging samples to entice larger retailers, hopefully some product concepts we can produce in house, on demand. We have a nice studio in an 1800’s mill where it will live:
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Imagine what you could make if you would pool all of us together… Now that’s some power to be proud off.
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Gorgeous products from an amazingly stunning studio. What a joy!
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Love that picture house, such a neat idea! Nothing a Mother enjoys more than a gift of her family, especially hand made by her Son. In her eyes a stack of money would pale in comparison. Nice work!
That lamp is a great example of repurposing useful components to a new function. Each piece has its own charm, that base speaks of time and mileage contrasted by the polished brass. Nice!
Like yours, my wife is the only recipient of any jewelry, and that occurs at a diminishing frequency - which makes it a little more special when it does.
They really built machines back then didn’t they? Serious gravity involved!
Yes! Patterns and textures can be a powerful inspiration. I had a 5’x5’ slab of travertine and needed to make a table base for it. I had decided on steel, but the slate was blank otherwise. At the scrap yard they had just taken in a load of old boiler pipe from public service, so corroded the scale was 1/4" deep. As soon as my eye landed on it the vision hit me like a bucket of water!
3" OD x 1/4" wall thickness. They also had a stack of 1/2" steel rod that had been stacked out in the weather a long time, capillary action had done a fine job of holding water between them and were heavily rusted. As I’m loading this super rusted material, the guy in the office stood in the door watching me. “You must be makin’ some art…”
After cleaning it all in an overnight bath of muriatic acid, the pitted texture of the surface was wonderful! That table looks like it was fished out of the Mediterranean!
All owed to the rusted texture my eye landed on.
Like you, my work area reflects the different deviations I have indulged in along the path of life. It is therapeutic to be nimble enough to lurch in any number of directions, depending on need or inspiration.
Thanks for sharing!
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That’s quite a track record! I see why looking at your work. I lust after that studio space!
I had the pleasure of working with my Son for a short time before he applied his metallurgical and materials engineering degree to a career path. That time was some of the most satisfying of my life.
The Glowforge is going lend itself to many aspects of your work-and father/son are going to rock it!
(I love the bird houses!)
Thank you for sharing!
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The messy part with the tools is behind the door in the back. We only needed ~1/3rd of this, but they didn’t want to sub-divide it… so now we have 1500 sq ft of studio/party hall/classroom/art gallery/what ever space to work with.
The bird feeder is my personal favorite - he and I invented it on the kitchen table one Sunday morning with a piece of cardboard, a pencil and a boot lace. 5 months later we were shipping the fold-it-yourself punched aluminum version to 50+ countries! He heads to college next fall - we had a great time.
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I would love to see a picture of that table if you have one! Rust, corrosion and “patina” are one of the reasons I love metal so much.
The wisdom of the scrap yard… 
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Yeah, the room looks immaculate. Mine usually looks like a grenade went off in it…
on that bird feeder! 50 countries! When I sold my jewelry, I had a map to pin each sale. It was satisfying to look at.
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This one? I made from a section of discarded bowling alley wood - the legs are from an old lab bench, got everything from Craigslist and old mills/shops in the area:
…or this one - a mill cart from a cigar humidor factory in Rhode Island:
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