So tried and epically failed to laser, but learned a lot

Yep, looks like it… And I am sure I looked just like the lady in the pictures on amazon putting out that fire…

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Someone with some drawing skills needs to make a Clifford-Godzilla mashup. Or dragon. But in my head it was Clifford belching out a laser beam with his eyes glowing :joy:

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I’m really glad it worked for you. I got chewed out by a fire inspector for having these onsite at an operation, even though we had full-sized commercial units as well.
Here is what consumer reports has to say about aerosol fire extinguishers: (TL;DR No.)
http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2013/04/an-aerosol-fire-spray-is-no-substitute-for-a-fire-extinguisher/index.htm

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My first thought on this (after admiring its beauty) was, “That would suck to dust!”

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Yes, and they have full fire extinguishers along with sprinklers. The point is to put out small fires inside the laser cutter (which happen frequently). Your kitchen and a grease fire are a completely different thing than a fire inside a laser cutter. Also the fire went for about 10-15 seconds, and I will note went out quite well (yes it took multiple targeted sprays as I was being dainty in fact to not spray the laser head). The advantage of this is that in fact you can put out a tiny fire. The regular ones are designed to put out a “real” fire, so aren’t actually as good at putting out tiny ones (although a little longer and this might have qualified as a real fire!)

When cutting cardboard or thin ply, most of the time a simple water spray bottle is what they use, since again in a few seconds it’s not going to flare up huge. The only reason this got as big as it did, was while I was “there” I wasn’t staring at the laser head, so didn’t notice it was stuck, meaning it heated up a lot of plastic before it caught. I am guessing that with the coffee cup video we’ve seen, on the GF this would simply have been a beep or something, and no fire…

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That makes sense, and the small form-factor means you can get it inside of something enclosed like Clifford more easily. They still worry me a bit due to the lack of a charge indicator. In my situation at the time, the fire inspector explained that he didn’t want someone to grab a tiny little can and think it would be sufficient in the warehouse, instead of one of the big canisters that were rated (and able to be examined for charge).

HA! I have that very same can, and I used it once to put out a fire in a toaster oven here at work that I won in a Secret Santa one year.

Someone had put a muffin in it and forgot to take off the paper wrapper (LOL!)…when they pulled it out, the paper touched the heating element, and poof! Instant ignition…

Everyone had laughed at me when I bought the extinguisher; they thought I was being too overly cautious and paranoid. They weren’t laughing anymore once that happened.

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It says easy clean-up. Does it use baking soda like some others? What is the extinguishing medium? - Rich

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Can says:

“MSDS: 06-1753A [FA101X] Potassium Lactate”

I remember it being a milky foam (I guess that’s where the “Lactate” part of the name comes in? Lol)

Found this, too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potassium_lactate

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Expired 2012-12-03 :grin:

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Lol, yep! I live dangerously now, though, so I’m gonna just bet it still works…

:laughing:

I bought some Diet Pepsi 3 days ago and it has an expiration 3/12/2017.

DIET PEPSI of all things having an expiration date shorter than milk.

:upside_down:

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You get to play with all sorts of fun toys.

Uhhh… after reading a bunch of the comments for it on Amazon, you’re braver than me.
“Lack of a pressure gauge (to indicate it is ready to use)” is a big concern for me… :fearful:

I believe @dan had mentioned at one time during the past year that some of the GF’s in the office had gone through their share of “accidents” (probably more so in the earlier days) during testing. I wonder if there are any melted glowforges in the basement storage… :thinking: :glowforge::fire::scream:

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It’s just like any other aerosol can…

But yeah, maybe good to get a new one, lol

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Since this is a safety question, I’m going to defer to the manual that will come with your Glowforge. You should always watch your laser while operating, and not depend on any features of the software or hardware to relax that consideration.

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Okay, now that that’s out off the way… :wink:
What about “in theory”, without anyone holding your feet to the fire?

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Safety is something we take extremely seriously. We created extremely strict rules for ourselves: no joking about safety; a safety committee that meets regularly to evaluate all safety issues; a bevy of world-class expert consultants who advise us; etc.

One of those consultants does nothing except advise us on how to convey safety information in the manual as clearly and cogently as possible. Any offhand or hypothetical comments I make might be misunderstood. I will defer entirely to the manual.

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@dan_berry, unfortunately unlike a lot of the “no comment” type comments we’ve gotten from @dan around shipping stuff, which is really up to him, this is one where sadly he really does have no choice. I am sure as a maker himself he’d love to talk with us about this, but unlike disclosing business information we all know that a device like this at some point will be misused by someone in a boundary case that they hadn’t considered and they will sue GF. Since anything is subpoenable any comment he made here could get him in extreme legal trouble down the road. While tragic, this is the state of the litigious society we live in. Last night I had to transfuse a patient, and the consent form takes forever as our lawyers require me to list possibilities that to be honest are less likely than the IV pole the blood is hanging from falling over and causing head trauma to the patient, but a lawyer said to some administrator “make sure the docs spell out anything that has ever happened to a patient ever in the history of multicelled life on this planet!”

That being said, I would like @dan not to talk about specific safety things (and very glad they take is extremely seriously, unlike the K40 guys) but rather their philosophy around fault tolerance. I am sure that they’ve worried about all the “usual” safety things that happen with laser cutters, but like the coffee cup, that is more of a fault-tolerance for unanticipated events. In medicine we talk about it as a layered defense (of course I make ordering errors all the time, I’m human and tired, but an extremely trained nurse and a pharmD review every order for safety, catching them all; and when we do have failures, and I am proud of the self-reporting tradition at our medical center, and review them we see astonishing boundary cases of the swiss-cheese effect where 10-different safety checks all had to line up while all being misaligned. I had one where if one of the 10 people who handled a very dangerous drug had been left handed instead of right, the mistake would have been caught; crazy things like that. So each time we add a resilient fault tolerant check.

It’s a philosophy, and I’d love to hear @Dan’s thoughts (even not just related to the GF)

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