Hello everyone. I purchased my glowforge pro the other day and I can’t wait for it to come in to use it! I was just wondering if you had any tips or tricks you would be willing to share. Or any mistakes you made that were avoidable. I have a business doing screen printing and vinyl decals so I’m good on the development of files to print. I took a class in high school and they had a laser engraver so I have a little bit of experience but that was also 7 years ago so it’s not all that fresh. I would appreciate any advice.
Also if you use products that aren’t proofgrade materials, where is the best place to buy them?
Thank you for any help. I am excited to join this community!
Welcome @thieretx412 to the forum. There are lots of Tips and Tricks in that category of the forum that forum members have been making through the years. Lots of folks put good details in their Made on a Glowforge posts regarding workflow, just no settings.
Beyond the Manual has lots of stuff on lots of different materials.
Use the search function of this forum and you’ll be amazed at just what people have contributed over the years.
Enjoy the tour. One tip is remember that if you thought of it, someone else most likely has thought of it and posted here and its been discussed at length. Not always easy to pull the difference topics together, but enough to get you in the ballpark.
And I have way more materials than I can every use!
Since you have some facility with design work, you know that most of the work is there and not with the tools that you use to make the product. Same with the Glowforge. The real thing is coming up with a design for something you would like to make. The Glowforg is plenty capable of turning it into a product, but only if you have it designed correctly for specific materials and for the Glowforge’s limits.
When you come up for air a few weeks from now you will have so many questions answered and so many new ones. For the new ones, learn to use the search function of the forum, it is super powerful.
Sorry, no, three things. Don’t be afraid to experiment! Be safe but you will get better much quicker if you are willing to sacrifice a board or two. I’ve seen people here spend $3000+ on this nice laser and then be afraid to experiment with a piece of draftboard!
Read everything you can here in the forum. It won’t all make sense, but when you run into a problem you will remember reading about that issue and know that the answer is probably somewhere here in the forum. I look forward to seeing your projects.
I have put together a lot of videos with random tips, projects, walkthroughs. If you have not set it up or used one yet I would recommend going back through the videos to the setup video and watching from earliest to latest, use what you find useful forget the rest, I hope it helps: