Hi all! I just solved a problem with my Glowforge Pro that has happened to me several times now so I thought I’d share the solution that I found that fixed the issue so if others are pulling their hair out with the same struggle, hopefully this will help.
Several times now upon first turning on my Glowforge it tries to go through it’s usual start up procedure, but when it comes to the arm and head actually moving around to center and so forth, it just sits there lurching sadly. The head will twitch in tiny increments to the right and the arm will twitch to the back until, once it goes as far back as it can it actually starts striking the back (with some concerning force!) of the enclosure hard enough that it makes me cringe and leap up to shut the machine off before it hurts itself. Yikes!!
I’ve gone through the cleaning procedure multiple times and tried turning off and on and unplugging to no avail. I finally discovered that if none of these steps help, with the machine off, if I move the arm approximately halfway to the middle of the bed and then gently scootch the head to the middle as well (so the print head is underneath the lid camera), then turn the machine on, it finally autocorrects itself and then all is fine again. I have no idea what is actually causing this problem (maybe the alignment is just slightly off sometimes when it shuts down?), but this seems to fix the issue when it does happen.
Just wanted to share this with y’all in case it can help anyone else out there who is panicking with their machine acting up with the holiday season rapidly approaching.