Where to buy materials

Hi all! I am fairly new to glowforge and have been reading through the posts. I was wondering what your recommendations are for buying materials besides glowforge. Any suggestions and recommendations are greatly appreciated!!

First off, welcome.

Can you say a bit about what you want to do?

Craft stores like Michael’s are great, lots of wooden plaques and boxes engrave well.
Lots of online places to buy acrylic. Also, if you are at all urban, there might be somewhere local to buy acrylic.

One of my mainstays is 1/8" Baltic Birch. I source mine from WoodPeckers and order through Amazon, but there are others. Adams Foam board is excellent for a lot of light projects and is a buck a sheet (20x30) in places like Dollar Tree.

Don’t count out the stuff directly from glowforge either; it might be a little bit pricier, but it runs very consistent, so many times, it is worth the upcharge.

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I’m interested in doing wood&acrylic crafts mainly. So I’m glad you told me that the Michaels woods work.

And I will most likely order more from glowforge just was wondering about other places I could get materials.

Any recommendations for cutting boards&wooden spoons

There are so many suppliers besides your local craft and home improvement stores. A few are estreet Plastics, Johnsons Plastics Plus, Ocooch Hardwoods, Ikea, Inventables, etc. After having your Glowforge for a bit, you will look at everything and wonder about laser engraving it. I suggest you look through the Gallery on the Glowforge home page and the Made on a Glowforge here in the forum to get an idea of what people use in different projects.

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More important perhaps is where you want to go, Revolution plywood is sold in 48 x 96 inch sheets and per-square foot is as cheap as you are likely to find and not have too many issues of knots and laserproof bondo surprises inside, Baltic Birch is much stronger and a much larger array of thicknesses, but I bought Birch that is not that standard the first thing and discovered why you never want to do that.

Whole wood is more expensive and still more the wider it gets. Balsa is too light, but basswood and poplar are good to start to experiment with. Maple, Cherry, and Walnut are another step up for work you expect to be prized for generations, and still more for the more rexotic and semi exotic that you can find references here.
https://www.wood-database.com/

Acrylic is more generic but you want cast and not extruded and they do stuff like mirror or mixed color etc but not much difference in the cutting.

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In my area there are Marshalls and TJ Max stores that always have a ton of cutting boards and wooden spoons. However, currently closed due to the state of the world.

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When things go back to normal you might also wanna try $ stores.
I have found a multitude of spoons and odd & assorted stuff to work with there before this all started.

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https://thewoodgallery.com/product-category/laser-engraving-materials-and-supplies/

http://www.laserjumpstart.com

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Thank you!

I recently went to the dollar store. They have a bunch of wood crafting things now, have you ever tried using those?

Bamboo spoons & cutting boards as well as many other wooden items.

@aanden have you tried using those in your glowforge? And if so, what settings do you recommend?

These items are wood, and wood varies a great deal. You will find that testing is your best bet. The only place in the forum that we can share settings is Beyond the Manual. There are lots of helpful posts about settings for non Proofgrade materials there.

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Beat me to it by that much =)

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