You might have missed this…it is the answer you were seeking.
Business owner to business owner…I have a couple of suggestions:
If you have never used a laser before, spend the time while you are waiting getting to know how the machine works by reading through as many tutorials ahead of it’s arrival as you can. Got a really good starter list here:
If you already feel comfortable using various kinds of design software, spend the time creating designs so you will have them ready to implement when the machine arrives.
And pre-purchasing material to have it ready also speeds up the process.
I’ve spent 69 full (as in 24hr) days over nearly 1,000 calendar days reading 318,000 posts. (@rpegg’s even worse )
I think it’s unfair to suggest that reading this forum is appropriate for finding the truth about a product featured on Amazon.
Those of us who have been here for the journey need to understand most all of the new folks we’re seeing here are new customers coming after Dan declared done.
The thing that drives me nuts with Amazon is the total lack of information, even about very basic things, much less details. I did buy the Glowforge without sufficient knowledge, but the key I focused on was actually working for non-techies, and that was my greatest concern for any of these robots. I had sadly come to the conclusion that 3D printing was too slow and only worked in plastic. All the really big or fast systems were tens of thousands of dollars ora pile of pieces to put together, and metal printing also beyond hope.
Much that I knew and much that I did not were things I did not like about laser cutting in general or Glowforge specifically, but I also knew that nobody was producing the Star Trek replicators yet and after watching the Stargate series perhaps that is a good thing.
She’s been here a week. She just ordered a product offered for retail sale. She hasn’t got any of the customary channels available to talk to the company that sold it to her - you know, like a phone number she could call, or an email for sales or shipping or something besides support where her answer is an automated response. She’s gotten radio silence from the company that took her money. She reaches out here and we tell her it’s her own fault, her expectations are flawed and she needs to read a few hundred thousand posts so she gets her expectations in line.
How many of us would order anything else for their business (or home for that matter) and find this acceptable? Is that your expectation from Kohl’s or Target or Dell or Best Buy?
For those who would claim they would, please go read all the comments in the Woodchuck thread. We’re coloring our responses here with our shared history of the crowd funding experience. We are the poster children for Stockholm Syndrome.
I feel nothing but sympathy for what she’s going through. She didn’t buy a crowdsourced pre-order. My honest advice would be for her to check out Craigslist and see if she can find a used Trotec or Epilog or Universal, buy it and cancel the GF. As we’ve seen, they’re not setup to properly respond to mission critical devices in a commercial setting. Unless you buy multiples you always face the possibility that it won’t work when you need it and it could take you several weeks to get your problem resolved. You might be lucky and have no issues but that’s not going to help the people who are dead in the water with deadlines approaching.
It’s bad business practice to rely on a sole sourced critical tool, supplier, material or other service provider. You have few options if they fail you. Far better to build your business around something with multiple sources of supply.
If Dremel gets theirs out the door, we may see that having external cooling is not as big a deal-breaker as many assume. I don’t expect they’ll alter their support model to mimic GF’s.
@deb1 - PM me and let’s see if there’s a way you can use my GF while you wait.
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