Last week
Announcements
What Happened with the Engraving Update?
A few prerelease customers reported problems with engraving Monday. We tracked down the problem today and reverted it. In short, some really cool software that’s half-done got turned on before it was ready. It allows for extremely low power operation. Since it redefines “power 1” as much lower than before, it breaks our Proofgrade settings, among other things. We rolled it back today. My sincere apologies to the prerelease customers affected!
Expect to see it again in the future, but this…
Made on a Glowforge
You’ve All Heard that Story
…about making a last-minute gift? Well, it happened here today, folks! My grandson came over this afternoon and wanted to make a gift for a friend’s birthday…which was happening in a couple hours hence. He had a drawing that had been done by his friend and we wanted to laser it onto a piece of maple Proofgrade. Since I’m not yet very proficient, it took me a while to figure out exactly how I wanted to get the drawing into the app…print it and trace it?..or create an SVG file with it? I also had …
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Army Training
Hopefully there are folks old enough around here to recognize the quote.
My niece is in Army ROTC and almost a year away from her commission and I was trying to figure out a gift for her since A) she has to miss our passover seder and B) I have a glowforge…
First off a nice dorm room door sign. The US Army logo has 3 colors (black, yellow and white) and figured I’d make each a different level of engrave, so brought the logo into AI and did a 3-color trace, which worked perfectly. Exported it t…
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New PR man! (Congrats @PrintToLaser !)
Patience Finally Justified!
But the Universe gives me no breaks. Received the laser a few days ago, but after months of slack time, I found myself committed to a time sensitive project - just as Rita came up for air and asked if I wanted a pre-release.
I had to just look at those boxes for three days. I has serious incentive to finish!
What a magnificent machine! Prettiest thing in the whole shop, looks like it belongs in the living room!
Very well made, I am so …
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How Low can it Go
So after the sign for my niece, then the dog tag which got insanely small…
I thought “hey just how small can you lase and still be readable?”
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So while not perfect, considering this is freakin’ wood, and is quite readable (even the US Army), it is astonishingly good. There is a tiny amount of ringing at the edge of the square (although interestingly not in the text)
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Art Stamp Laser Polymer
It was a busy day at the 'forge today. We had breakfast guests and I wanted to demo my GF. They were all rolling eyes and “oh boy, she’s got another geek toy, we’ll humor her.” Everybody trooped downstairs after breakfast and they saw my samples and saw the possibilities. Starting to get excited. Then we whipped out a few quick items (a duplicate of the parametric box from @mpipes ; a custom cake topper for a 40th birthday my sister was making a cake for). That’s when they really got it. I…
Badge of Honor
Supplies: Proofgrade 1/4" Acrylic & 1/8" Walnut Hardwood - Op Time: 1/4" Acrylic @ 450 LPI 10mins - 1355 LPI 37mins - Walnut Hardwood @ 450 LPI 10 mins.
I want to start this post with- I hate Blender. It’s seems overly complex. I am sure it’s good at what it does. But damn.
Anyway.
Fusion 360.
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Blender.
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AI.
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Glowforge.
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Dang.
The inverted one is my fav.
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Etching on Glass Tiles
Messed around a bit playing with some glass tiles from Home Depot. They’re backed with a painted coating that I expected would ablate and leave the scored glass. I was interested in what kind of etching I could get with the glass.
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Instead of ablating the paint it seemed to melt it into the etch. The view of the back was one I ran at 225 lpi for the etch at 1% power. I saw some striations in the black so bumped it to 5% and 340 lpi for the rest of the experiments.
Here’s the back of t…
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It Was in the Cards
One of the things I’ve been looking forward to doing on my Glowforge is to build up a library of cards for different occasions. I made this one of a group of aspen trees to see how well it could handle the intricate details.
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It can be a bit tricky with the cross wind from the fans as it will sometimes blow parts you’ve cut out in front of the laser while it’s cutting another part and prevent the cut from working as expected. This one worked pretty well from that standpoint, but I ha…
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Glowforge Can Fix It
If you have young kids, you might know about how Home Depot hosts a monthly kids’ event, where they are given a free kit and make something (usually involves just a hammer, nails, glue, stickers & paint).
The latest project was an Easter Basket, made from pine & a paper posterboard type of material; some of you may have made the same with your kids…
Well, the face (and of course the ears) were made of that paperboard, and as y’all can imagine, those don’t last long with 2 rambunctious boys. O…
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Knife Block (Completed)
Okay changed the shape of the box up a little, cleaned up the inlay and widened the spacing where it needed it for the bird and the stripes to make them pop a little more…I like this one a lot better with those reeds. The other one was just a hair too short, and I didn’t like the front.
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If anyone is interested in duplicating the effect, I discuss how I did it here:
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Delicate Touch
Supplies: 20lb Copy Paper - Op Time: 10mins
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Cinch Bag (Catalog Project)
I’m heading out of town this weekend and I remembered a quick project I wanted to make before the trip. A while back I made these Energy Tokens…
I don’t really like the holder for them. It’s difficult to open and very fragile. I was thinking about it this morning and remembered the leather cinch bag in the catalog! I didn’t have long, so I had to get started!
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5:50am: Idea
5:57am: Glowforge on and catalog loaded up
6:02am: Cinch bag cut
6:05am: Custom tag designed (borrow…
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Sunstone Laser Comparison
So two things are required of any GF PRU recipient who has another laser - first we have to do the @takitus /@marmak3261 Aztec Sunstone and the other thing we need to do is a comparison with the results of our other lasers so we can see if we really are getting groundbreaking wonderfulness.
So here’s a Sunstone engrave from the GF and a Redsail 60W.
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Can you tell which was from which machine? I hope so - it’s very apparent in real life. One is Baltic Birch ply and the other i…
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Useful Stuff
Amongst all the cool stuff people with PRUs have been posting I wanted to post something not quite so pretty.
Here’s an ugly example of what you can do with the tool.
Starting with this,
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I ended up with this,
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So what is it?
My GF sits on a Home Depot 46" rolling tool cabinet. There are two swiveling & locking casters and two fixed casters. They work okay except when moving it around you have to wiggle the cabinet into place when tucking it into a …
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Another Lux Prize Winner
Continuing the discussion from Contest: Design a replacement part for something that is broken :
Some time back in November another forum member, @marmak3261 suggested to forum members to submit a link to, or a drawing of an example of, a time they they used technology to fix a broken thing in their home; I’m paraphrasing, see below:
As a passing thought I submitted a 3D model for the articulation arm for a cheap Lorex baby monitor that one of the twins yanked from the wall:
Honestly, I wasn…
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In Spite of Change
In spite of the recent changes for engraving settings right when I made these, I got a decent look out of both of them. The photo is of my son when very young…wearing the wizard hat and cape that I made for him, thus the ‘caption’ on the wizard engraving. The other is for my lovely daughter-in-law. Just a couple of examples of what can be done with the Glowforge. They live back east, so won’t have opportunity to see it in action for a while longer…and I’ll take these to them when we visit back t…
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Weeding to drive you batty
My good friend (and evil twin) is a craft blogger and illustrator, and she’s graciously allowing me to use some of her patterns in my work. Some day, I hope to create really fun designs with her mandalas - but for now, I’m just fumbling around and learning what this machine can do.
Thought I’d share a few of these experiments, which are just testers/WIP’s. I’m just exploring different materials, sizes, settings and (next) coloration techniques.
My first attempt was this little bat mandala, don…
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A Box for Ben
My youngest grandson will be nine on Sat. I used an online box generator to make the plans for this box. First time I’ve ever made a box out of wood, so gluing it was quite a challenge. A couple engravings (not shown here) left something to be desired, since I did them while they were tweaking the engrave settings…and the last negative thing is the cheapo little hinges…and the screws that
went all the way through the wood. A woodworker, I’m not. BUT, the good part is that I like it and I think …
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Adventures in Acrylic
I’m almost feeling kind of guilty about posting things now…holler when you’ve had enough.
I’d done a little bit of work with some extruded mirrored acrylic earlier last month and although the project turned out okay - the smell of the acrylic after the print was enough to put me off of it for a while.
So I finally tried out some of the cast Proofgrade acrylic. And I know everyone thinks I’m totally in the tank for Glowforge…and they would be totally correct…BUT that’s only because they…
Hoppy Easter Wreath
Hi fellow forgers. A few weeks ago my six year old daughter wanted to get in on the forging and make an Easter themed wreath. She did a quick concept sketch of a bunny surrounded by Easter eggs, and asked me if I could make it for her. I said ‘sure I can make that, and I don’t think it will take too long!’ Famous last words.
The eggs for the outside were indeed very easy. I traced a photo of a few different real eggs so that they would have a natural look, and scaled them to real world size. Th…
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Bat Mandala Redux
Yesterday I shared a photo of an attempt to engrave one of my friend’s bat mandalas on to leather.
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Because the design has lots of very small details (itty bitty bats, surrounded by even tinier stars) it’s a real pain to weed something like this … or so I thought. I was putzing around in my studio yesterday when I noticed a giant roll of tape sitting on one of my tables. I have absolutely no memory of putting it there, but there it was.
Upon closer inspection, I realized that it was a…
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TGIF
Not worthy of the Made in a Glowforge category, but here’s a quickly I ran of to hang on my office door on Fridays…
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Proofgrade Maple Plywood
Flowchart exported from draw.io
Print time: 15m 46s
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Keep Calm
Hey Folks-- I needed a little trinket to give members of the church choir for Easter. In past years I’ve given little chocolate eggs and jelly beans, but one of them was recently diagnosed with diabetes and it seemed like it would be insensitive to do the same thing this year. Fortunately I can do something different and unique with a Glowforge.
So I pulled the shield logo off the church’s website (hope that’s okay!), traced the shield shape in Illustrator, and placed the raster image on top…
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Pile O Kitties
One last project before the weekend. I made this for my husband, who is even more of a nut about cats than I am, if that’s possible. I found the free pattern here , and hand traced it in Illustrator to get the cut lines. The whiskers are actually tiny boxes so I could do a vector engrave.
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I cut it three times, out of the three Proofgrade hardwoods (maple, cherry, and walnut), so that gave me three puzzles with a different mix of cats in each. Each puzzle cut in less than 7 minutes.…
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Bag-O-Bones
Several months ago, a friend offered me a big bag of bone beads that she was getting rid of. I accepted the offer, in anticipation of my . They’re vintage bone beads or pendants, sliced into random, organic shapes. She sent a huge freezer bag that weighs in at about 2 lbs:
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I’ve long been a fan of scrimshaw work and I’ve been hoarding a stash of fossil ivory for a decade or more, in hopes of trying my hand at it some day. These bone beads + the PRU afforded a great opportun…
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Card Sorting Tray
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Stamp Boxes
https://community.glowforge.com/t/living-hinges-an-exploration-in-acrylic-and-plywood/7096?u=jules
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Crafty Cookie Cutters
https://community.glowforge.com/t/proofgrade-1-4-clear-acrylic-bunny-cookie-cutter/7104?u=jules
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Free Laser Designs
Universal Ruler
https://community.glowforge.com/t/openscad-international-ruler-of-mystery/6996?u=jules
Parametric Cone
https://community.glowforge.com/t/parametric-cone-doo-hickey-fusion-360/7045?u=jules
Journey to the Center Ruler
https://community.glowforge.com/t/journey-to-the-center-ruler/7098?u=jules
Super Special Projects
Dream Castle
https://community.glowforge.com/t/dream-home/7052?u=jules
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