Ok, for those who didn’t see (and you should that pic was a heavy setup job) I got my PRU today. So how easy was it?
Well I didn’t get the manual, so here is the story, and I have to say @dan this thing is easier to set up than my HP laser jet was…
I took the day off from work (because - GlowForge!)
Since I have been on nights leading up to now (ugh), I haven’t even had time since @rita informed me last week to prep the area. I will be moving my 3D printers into an enclosure I built, but I have a massive production job running on them 24x7 for a medical simulation class through this week, so no time to clear off the table.
So ran down to the basement found some scrap 1/2" ply, grabbed a 4 1/4" hole saw and a spare dryer duct/louvered opening, and cut it out to fit in our family room window. I used split pipe insulation to seal it into the sash. Worked perfectly.
OK, so first Fedex punked me all day. I can basically see the fedex regional center from my house (there are actually trees in the way, but I can see the buildings next door) and it is about 2 minutes by car. The tracing app looked like this:
So I didn’t do anything that would make me unavailable once my wife left for the day early on. So when did it get delivered?
Yes, a staggering 8 hours later at around 4:45.
Now the problem was my wife is at a meeting all day so I had to pick our baby up (as opposed to our new baby, who I think I love more already - hey don’t judge, the love between a man and his laser is very special…) since he is still 2 weeks away from having his license (although ironically he does have his pilot’s license, he just can’t drive to the airport)…
So I had 30 minutes total 2 get this thing unpacked, assembled, print the ruler and then the project for the photo.
So opened the boxes and since I didn’t have a manual (other than the email from support to make sure in addition to the little orange things I remove the foam block on the left) I removed the obvious red and orange things (sort of like a HP printer if you’ve ever done one of those) and the foam block. Took the tray out of the box and slid it in. There are little divots that it sits in.
Plugged it in (sorry, it’s just a black IEC cord, no red one). And there was a whole lot of gurgling as the air ran through the cooling line as you see in the picture below.
At this point around 7.5 minutes have elapsed. The clock is ticking!!!
So closed the lid, and turned it on. Opened the app site and it asked me to connect to the wifi of the glow forge. I did, and then it asked me about which network is mine + password. It also asked for the name. A few seconds later it started to self-check/configure, which took around 3 minutes.
OMG, now we are over 11 minutes in!
So as soon as it looked like it was ready I threw in a piece of the proof grade maple, and selected the ruler, dragged it to the corner. Adjusted the settings from automatic to manual as support had told me with their new settings. Checked that it had to cut set to cut, engrave set to engrave, and pressed print in the corner.
Now ran over to ValleyForge and pressed the big pulsing button, and then lasing started to happen.
Man, box on front step to first lase in <13 minutes!
yeah @dan, ya done good.
Ok, but now the real test, I needed to make the giant GF logo (note I had earlier in the day brought it into AI, done the trace and exported as a SVG - note there was a weird bug on import which I will report, but I reimported it and voila). Loaded some Home Depot birch 1/8" ply and dragged it out, used the manual settings and pressed go.
6 minutes later it was done. I grabbed it (there were a few spots that didn’t quite cut through for whatever reason - utility knife cut through these thin spots). I grabbed the Glowforge-Teal Glitter Krylon spray paint and a coat hanger through the hanging hole I made (for the umbilical cord) and frantically sprayed it.
It wasn’t even dry, when I pulled out the door a few minutes later to get my son, and drive over to the hospital… So when you look at the picture, those marks on the surface are where the paint rubbed off on the newspaper in my trunk…
