No dice. Same error.
Anecdotally, I have freshly cleaned everything, shut off the machine and rebooted, and it still says the material isn’t within the thickness guidelines.
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My strong recommendation…get a sheet of medium proofgrade (cheapest draftboard will do), or a sheet of 1/8"thickness flat/unwarped cheap plywood or MDF from your local hardward store, cut it to size, mask it with white full sized masking tape, …and use that for the Calibration.
Once it is Calibrated the issues you keep having will likely go away. But you need to do it according to the instructions that they give you, or you’re wasting your time.
Or raise the material up to bring it higher into range, for the rest of the time you have the machine.
You can buy a Seklema mat for about $85 that will put your paper into the correct range and hold the paper securely to boot. It’s designed to use with a laser, and works great.
Of the two options, the calibration is quicker and cheaper.
Third option is to set the focus height manually by flipping the AUTO-FOCUS switch in each operation in each file, and that allows you to set the focus height manually and override the auto-focus.
But that can be an awful lot of operations that have to be set if you have a complex design. If it’s all cuts that are just one color…not a big deal. (You will have to reset the focus each time you use the file too I think, so it’s really better IMO to just Calibrate the machine and get on down the road. Then you don’t have to worry about it again.)
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This option is currently my preferred route since I have none of the other supplies here right now. The thing is, this third option does not work. It still tries to focus even if all steps are set to manual with a typed-in value, and the material height set as well. I have tried on a file with only one step, set it to manual focus, typed in a value, hit enter, double-checked, manual value was accepted and remembered, checked to make sure uncertified material height was entered, it was, press print… Head starts to focus and it tells me my material is out of range.
Suggestions for getting that third route to succeed?
No… I can’t think of any way to make it work for you. You might need to go with option 2 until you can get a sheet of wood or acrylic to use to run the calibration. 
Oh, wait a minute …you might need to specify the thickness first in the Unknown Materials button, without using the Set Focus button on the paper first. Then change it in each operation in the thumbnail column.
(They did make a couple of changes to the layout, but that procedure used to work to override the auto-focus.)
Just for situational awareness, apparently specifying the thickness in the Unknown Materials button no longer overrides the auto-focus. Or at least, it doesn’t stop the machine from “focusing on your material” after pressing the Print button in the software.
Then it still gives the error message.
Specifying the material thickness has never overridden the scanning or autofocus step. It does a couple things: it sets the dewarping value for the lid camera, and is supposed to act as a fall back value if the auto focus fails for some reason.
I don’t know what the failure and/or fallback conditions are though. In the past, I’ve actually been able to run a score line on material sitting on the bottom of the glowforge (tray removed) by setting different values for material height and focus height to override the autofocus.
I skimmed back through this thread but didn’t see - have you verified that there is actually a red dot coming from the head during the scanning process?
Unfortunately, everything here is going to be mostly conjecture until they look at the logs to see what is going on in the scanning step.
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Hi @jimsocks. I’m sorry that you’re continuing to run into trouble with the focuser on your Glowforge as you try to print on cardstock. I was reviewing the thread and log files, and for next steps, I’d like to move this to email since it can require replacement parts and confirmation of your private information to help resolve. I just sent you an email. Can you confirm either through email, or a post on here that it has been received? Once confirmed I can close this thread and continue any communications to address this through email. Thank you!
Now that we are working through email, I’m going to close this post.