Yep! Big difference in the smell. The GF stuff is the least stinky of the ones I’ve tried. (Also tried the Inventables acrylic, some I picked up from Amazon (not too bad), and some mirrored extruded stuff from EBay for comparison. The extruded absolutely reeks!)
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That’s what I thought going in. But there is near zero masking & finishing work needed. For me that’s worth a lot.
I usually run wood across the random orbit sander to clean off smoke residue rather than mask it. It usually takes about 30 seconds to clean it. There were 32 pieces in the sewing kit I did. That’s 64 sanding operations (double sided). A half-hour(!) of just sanding.
I could have masked it. There’s a cost in time (probably 2-5 minutes to mask and squeegee both sides of 2 pieces of material). The mask also costs me.
Then I have to finish it - 3 coats of stain plus 2 or more coats of polyurethane with sanding & drying time. It’s another hour and 2 elapsed days for the sewing kit box.
So how much do you spend on materials & time to avoid the cost of PG.
It may not work out that well since you’re sitting on a rock in the Mediterranean (those of us stuck in northern climes with snow the order of the day 5 months out of the year are not feeling bad for you 
). It is an analysis everyone who is doing this for money should calculate to determine if it makes sense to use it or not.
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Totally agree with @jamesdhatch that depending on time/money the finish time absolutely needs to one counted. When I did the sign the other day, I had a beautifully finished sign “pre finished” in minutes. It mattered. When I’ve made jigs, etc where nobody will ever see it, then super-cheap 1/8" unfinished ply is great.
I felt the exact same way “I’ll only use PG material in the beginning” but for anything I need a nice simple finish, it’s perfect and my first choice. Sure there are woods they don’t currently have, but what they have is superior, especially if I factor my time.
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Set that up yourself. LOL
Like the breakout of time and labor.
For those in the US, if someone considers their time worth $10/hour, then MAYBE PG 
isn’t worth it.
Overseas and outside the US, once the shipping costs, currency exchange rate and potential VAT/import fees are applied, you will be able to find that balance point.
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Well Medicare considers my hourly wage around $2.92/hr on a subsequent day in the hospital per patient… [edit for those curious] private insurers get me up to around $4/hr…
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Have (and had) several medical offices as clients. Talking with the Office Managers and Insurance processors, I just don’t know how their offices stay open, as the percentage of Medicare patients increases.
The rule of thumb on billing is/was whatever Medicare set as a scheduled payment (which they underpaid A LOT), that dollar amount was multiplied by 3 to establish the standard billing rate.
Good thing those in the medical profession do it for more than the money, they get short changed too often.
Well in fairness my primary board specialty (Hospital Medicine) is really a loss leader. We allow the guys who do expensive stuff (stick sharp things into people) to keep doing that, and people like me who are experts in guiding patients safely though their stay (and we sit on the ward, not buried in some procedure suite across the building or campus unable to scrub out right now) so the nurses all know us on a first name basis. We sit there 24x7x365 in house (well not one person obviously - there are 123 of us in my group) so the hospital kicks in a fair amount of a hospital medicine group’s salary since they make more money off the procedural guys because people like my group allow them to concentrate on procedures while we concentrate on safe admit/discharge of the patients.
That being said $70 is not a lot for 24 hours in the hospital (admit day pays about 2-3x that). That’s why I always laugh when a patient/family says “Hey I’m paying your salary!”…
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I’ve finally blown through my store credit, so from now on out, it’s on me…but, I have quite a nice stockpile, now…and won’t have to do any more shopping for a while.
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[quote=“Jules, post:2, topic:7899”]
I would suggest that since that list will change between the time you receive yours and the time they receive theirs that you not volunteer the information.
[/quote]
fine
That is probably what @dan is going to say anyway… 
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Outside of the smell, is there a difference in cut/engrave?
I would think that would be a fairly standard process (every process has variations), but I am not an acrylic expert.
Confirmed. Started off with PG acrylic and wondered why folks were whinging about the smell. After my first run with locally-sourced acrylic, I knew. 
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Chuckle! Over-exposure…I’m starting to think like him… (OMG! I’ve become a Loompa… 
)
Actually…i do apologize for that…I was on the phone getting a lawyer squared away for some estate work and was thinking legal while I typed up the response…it slopped over. I’m normal again now.
(As normal as I get anyway.) 
Not really. Everything cut just about the same.
I wouldn’t try to engrave on the extruded though…not without a gas mask.
(You probably think I’m kidding…nuh-uh.)
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I wonder if the better approach would be, if asked:
“When my unit shipped, they said some of these functions were active”, and paraphrase examples rather than copy and paste the full list. “I don’t remember all them, but I remember some of them.”
But then I’d have to wait for it to ship for the question to be valid. All I’ve done so far is accepted Glowforge’s offer to send me my unit ASAP and given them my shipping address. Next I wait for another e-mail that says it has shipped. That will happen before 01-July.
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Should be a link to what you want in the manual.
I presume the RUs do no more, but may do less, than the PRUs, which do no more than the betas, but may do less. I.e. betas run the leading edge software, PRUs lag behind and RUs possibly lag even more.
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Mayhaps there should be, but I just re-read it and there isn’t. 
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I just checked my PRU emails. The list of Done, To-do, and Bonus features was in the initial “Would you like a GF…” message as opposed to the shipping info or manual. May be different for the Production emails, but that was my experience.
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I have had the same experience in the past, but I placed a 
order last night and just received the shipping confirmation. Agree that it’s best not to depend on such a quick turnaround, but nice to know it can happen. 
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