Last Week’s Highlights
May Update
We’re working like mad to get you your Glowforge on schedule (here , unchanged), and it’s keeping us busy every second. We’re camping at the factory, studying reports from the field and the line, doing everything we can to make sure quality and production throughput hit our goals.
I get asked a lot, “Is everything going smoothly?” To which I smile wryly and answer, “No, things never go smoothly. We have a new surprise every week, sometimes every day, that threatens to delay us. Our team is wo…
Is it better to have the longest engrave areas set up to run in a horizontal direction in your layout?
Yes, engrave is always left-to-right, and it’s fastest to put things with the longer engrave dimension horizontally as a result.
New Tips and Tricks category: brought to you by the Glowfolk
Here you’ll find a whole host of tips, tricks tutorials, and more:
What about the hose noise? Can you put a muffler on it?
It’s possible to amplify or quiet house-noise and exhaust-noise separately… fortunately it’s not a zero sum game. For example, insulating your exhaust makes indoors quieter without making outdoors louder.
Does the exhaust fan shut off when you lift the lid during an operation?
Kawaii Soup
Happy Sunday everyone!
Our friend, Suezu, is having a birthday dinner tonight. She LOVES cute things…think Hello Kitty everything, cartoon sushi pillows, colorful kawaii socks, and you get the idea. My go to for her last few birthdays has been getting her something with Hello Kitty, but I decided to try to do something different (and unfortunately very last minute) this year. She also enjoys the Vietnamese noodle soup, pho, which we try to get at least once a month, and jewelry from craft fe…
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Cat on a Shelf
Elves on shelves are old hat, but tonight’s project was for my wife. In one of their exam rooms at her animal hospital they have a tree painted on the wall (painted by one of the staff).
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They want some “cat perches” in the tree branches. So she asked me to make some wooden perches.
First I modeled it in OnShape with a parametric design. I realized I probably wouldn’t have enough proof grade maple on hand, so made it totally parametric with thickness as a parameter. I luckily…
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Add on project (2 cat perches are done, awaiting final sand/finish) and of course you need some way for the cats to get to the perches and between them, so “cat steps” are needed.
This one again was done in OnShape with the LaserJoint Featurescript (sized to fit behind the doors) and decided given their small size they needed a surface a cat could grip so played with AI patterns to make it grippy (hence the tutorial ).
Awaits sanding and the same finish as the primary shelves (and a whole bunch…
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Starwars Coasters
Soooo, picked up a couple of two tone acrylics from Inventables…
@dan : You guys really need to offer these in PG; so cool!
The WIN:
Anyway, even though the plastic protective sheet says to leave in place when “laser profiling”, I peeled it away and did a test on the black on white, and it came out pretty nice (although with ridges, but the site states “Note: PPI’s over 400 when used in vector cutting are likely to cause of tacky edges”)…but with lots of residue that I had to clean up with lig…
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Titanium Buckle
I decided to take some of the titanium plate I was using for testing and make a belt buckle out of it. I took it over to a friends shop and spent some time milling out the basic buckle design.
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That gave me a good buckle to start off with.
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After that I did some etching with it in the Glowforge. I chose a nice spaceship cutaway view that I liked.
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I’m interested to see how it holds up. I may also test some more to see if I can buff or bead blast it clean again and …
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Time to 'Forge
By now everyone is probably tired of the Star Wars Day jokes and gimmicks, tchotchkes and future dust collectors
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Getting Organized
I recently got an Oculus Rift from my brother which was an awesome present from an awesome brother
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Stained Glass
Something I was working on last week before I left was testing the effects of various paints on the acrylic, and I wanted to see what some of the glass paints that I had could do. So I popped over to a stained glass site that offered free patterns, and rehydrated some of my nearly gone paints. (Don’t recommend that by the way, they must use something like ammonia as a base in those things…nearly passed out a couple of times. Just buy new paints if you need them.)
Anyway, the paints I had wer…
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Exhausting Experiment
@clone the other day, there was a discussion about the noise outside, along with many prior posts by me and others.
So on the debate went, and @dan suggested it was the type of hosing I had chosen. Now I have to say I am a big fan of solid metal tubing for fire resistance and sealing (with a dryer I care only about fire since a little humidity isn’t going to kill anyone). and the tube I bou…
A Labor of Love
Some of you may recall my original, laughable attempt, and the follow up…
Well, folks, I finally completed it. Here is the final version (well, still gluing a few layers, but this is it assembled, anyway):
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8th Wedding Anniversary gift, so I made it in an octagon shape, 8 inches wide, and with 8 layers. And painted in Bronze highlights, since that is the traditional 8th Anniversary gift. I wanted to inlay real bronze, but that was just waaaaa…
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Mother’s day gift goes viral
[New photo by Mark Evans]
Made this for a freind for mother’s day. Everyone seeing it is loosing their minds.
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Mystery Miter (Solved!)
…for a project I’m working on…
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Kaleidoscope
Have been playing around with a project using lens, mirrors and prisms. It is not a GF friendly effort but somewhere in the middle of the project I started to wonder what the average GF user could build. Maybe the simplest of Kaleidoscopes (3 mirrors) would be easy enough. Chose a box design instead of the usual tube because I wanted to use only readily available GF friendly materials. The current GF inventory doesn’t include mirrors so I ordered a sheet of mirrored acrylic from Invent…
Obligatory Escutcheon
Yup. It’s an unwritten law that the Glowie PR users are required by laser zeitgeist to create an escutcheon for the button…and I’m running kinda late.
Since all the cool star-gate and aztec calendar designs were taken, I just worked up something simple.
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Pew! Pew! Pew!
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Coin of the Realm
…on embossing powder and coins of the realm. This is about 3.5" across…pretty much coaster size. Just a little ‘thing’ for my brother. Not a wooden nickel but a wooden denarii.
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Ian’s Puzzles
So no new designs today, as I spent almost the entire day in our simulation center (starting at the awful hour of 7am) teaching Advanced Cardiac Life Support to 50 of our nurses and 3 of our physicians. This guy unfortunately didn’t make it because he A) choked on a plastic bag, B) someone shoved a metal rod into his ear and finally C) someone tied his oxygen line into a double granny knot…
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When I got home I started cranking out a few copies of the cat steps so I could sand/glue while…
https://community.glowforge.com/uploads/short-url/u5GVDyeI1J9RmQHFkGa2MskyOHF.jpg Aztec Puzzle
I liked the first pattern, so while I was having dinner I ran up a quick copy.
Couple of things…whatever I tried to do to fix the double lines problem accidentally made it worse, so be careful when you fix double lines. (Even having done it a few hundred times, you can still get busy and forget to check in Outline Mode, and this one had some serious overlays that doubled. Yep…quadruple burn lines. My bad.)
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More Mother’s Day
[image] [image] As I do every year, I’ll be hosting my mom and one of my sisters (the other one is out of town this week) for brunch tomorrow. I wanted to make up a little something for them to take away, and came up with these little place cards/drink charms. The symbol on each is the American Sign Language symbol for the first letter of their names. I’ve got “d,” “l” and “k” here. Engraved into 1/4" acrylic, cut into diamond shape, and filled in engraving with gold paint. Attached to the g…
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Cat Dish Holder
This was just a quick item I whipped up to solve a problem, which was that the cats like their water in nice ceramic bowls but they also like to tip them over. I don’t get it, but whatever.
I used that great 1/4" Chemcast acrylic that you see @marmak3261 using a lot. The first iteration was just a simple open topped box that we put the bowl down into. That worked fine for the cats but my husband kept scraping his fingers on the edges getting the bowl out for refill. The new one works better…
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Mothers Day Brooches
My mom is one of the few ladies I know that still wears brooches. Every time she goes to the senior center, she pins one on. So I figured this could be a great little mother’s day gift that she could wear to dinner tonight.
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I cut the pins on pg cherry plywood in about 7 minutes…
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but I did not like how dark they turned out. So I decided to invert the image in illustrator, and make the flower one about a half inch larger.
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Yves actually liked the darker ones better…
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Aaaaaannnnnd…We seem to have triggered an Escutcheon-Off.
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Aztek Puzzle
Ian’s Puzzle Fun
Here is another variation on the Aztek Puzzle. Aztek Puzzle
As you can see in that thread, I had a go at a similar puzzle, which works (I think) but isn’t very aesthetically pleasing. So I had another go. I hope you like it.
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As I don’t have my GF yet, I’d love to see someone else cut this, even if it is just out of cardboard,
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