Where is the best place to buy materials?

Hi Fellow Glowforgers!!
My delievery day it just a couple of weeks away. I am so excited.
Where are you all finding to buy materials? Any good websites with good pricing?
Thanks all!!!
Tara

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Glowforge store is great for proofgrade and their acrylic price is amazing too. If you want to buy bulk acrylic I’d go to piedmont plastics. For wood I’d look and see if you have a local exotics dealer or sawmill.

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What kind of material are you looking for?

Inventables has a good selection: https://www.inventables.com/categories/materials
Johnson’s Plastics is always good: https://www.johnsonplastics.com/
or any other Rowmark distributor: http://rowmark.com/distributor/index.asp
If you are looking for stuff cheap, I would recommend looking for a local sign shop or acrylic vendor. You can usually buy their drops fairly cheaply.

Oh, and there is this new place, they make some nice materials. But they will only sell it to you right now if you bought there laser. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: shop.glowforge.com.

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I have not heard of this place! And there is one close to me!

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Piedmont is amazing, They mostly sell 4*8’ sheets, so youll have to buy in bulk, but if you know youll use it, definitely worth the price. A lot of times theyll cut them down for you too if you ask nicely

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Amazon is decent for some stuff. I got 45 12x12 Baltic Birch plywood sheets for $1.33 /each. Also found dnd plywood, but I haven’t tried ordering from them yet. Their prices seem really solid though.

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Been eyeing that baltic birch more than once. Don’t know about piedmont, though. I don’t think they have one near me.

$0.66 for 1/8x12x12 MDF seems reasonable, $1.32 for 12x24. :thinking: They also have a great selection of non-birch ply species. Nice find!

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If you happen to be near a Woodcraft store, they stock high-quality 12x12 BB in a variety of thicknesses, as well as variety of hardwood species.

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Woodcraft is great and very convenient if you have one. Beware though, that their prices are way higher than the local sawmill. So if you have a sawmill near, I highly recommend checking there too before making any huge purchases. Usually woodcraft gets their stuff from the local mill and increases price by 200%

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Baltic Birch (real stuff anyway) is only made in the US by a couple of mills. The rest is either European or Russian.

The US stuff tends to be in “normal” sizes of 4x8 (or derivatives) vs the BB standard of 5’x5’ (or whatever the funny units they use are that match that size :slight_smile:)

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And if you order over $100 from shop.glowforge.com you get free shipping.

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they are great

Is that free shipping for US only or for Internationals as well?

We’re not shipping units or materials to international customers yet.

Hey @dan - I have $203 in my shopping cart, and it’s charging me $9 for shipping. Do you have to spend $100 AFTER store credit for the free shipping?

It should give you a shipping credit when you check out. :slightly_smiling_face:

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Ah! It wasn’t deducting it at first, but I just tried it again and it did indeed give me a shipping credit. Thanks!

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There turns out to be a Piedmont Plastics 15 minutes from my house. Drove over, had a nice chat, ended up buying 4 sheets of cast acrylic (4x8 feet) which they’re going to cut to 12x20. They have all sorts of interesting materials, and really know a lot about plastics and what’s laser safe. And since there’s no shipping, etc., the price is pretty awesome, though there’s a bit of a wait for cutting. I can see this becoming addictive. Admittedly, you have to want wholesale quantities - they only sell full 4x8 foot sheets - but “too much material” is not a problem for me.

Thanks @takitus for mentioning them!

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I’m not sure it is for any of us. I just bought a set of shelves for materials. Now I have to assemble them and move the materials from everywhere to the shelf. It will help with organization around here, to be sure.

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