I had a great number of problems with the Head fan previously. When it did not do its job I waited till it finished and went to clean that fan, It might scorch the wood more in some part but you would have finished work. To have the entire job destroyed because of a glitch is unacceptable as one can never start out on a job with expensive materials for fear that everything will turn to trash. I would certainly like to have a means of seeing how well the fan is doing but PLEASE let me choose if it can be shut down.
To make things worse. this is only the Third Thing done on a fresh for practical purposes new machine and not even dusty yet. I experimented using previous knowledge with a vacuum cleaner and indeed the fan is slightly sticky. As this is with the Glowforge shut down it is not about anything electronic being episodic but the fan only.
This should be something that can be fixed in Software to have whatever color or flashing note in the GFUI to warn that the fan is not operating up to snuff but even if it might destroy the work to keep going it would certainly destroy the work to stop in the middle.
For now, I have shut down again until this software glitch is fixed. I have not started in on anything to clean the fan that does not even show dust as yet though I could spray a bit of silicone spray to ease any tight spots or the hand cleaner I used to keep the old fan operational, though there is nothing to clean that is visible. As real dirt builds up I would hope to be able to clean it as I did before with the hand cleaner. As to move it outside to clean is an imposibility.
Is this the one where they ask you to re-seat the head? Make sure the contacts are good? (Little behind on my notifications/problem solutions, but try that.)
Was the first thing done. and it is all but brand new. The pins were well set and moving easily without enough dirt anywhere to be much of an issue. That was why I went to see if there really was any resistance in the fan itself that had nothing to do with any of that. I had been watching and seen the fan slow a bit and when it shut down was far to the front that I have seen makes it harder to keep a good air movement than when further back.
The key issue for me even beyond any fan problems is the total shut down on fan issues at all. As noted above when you start a job you are committed to go through the whole thing. Any stop half way through is as ruined as if there was any other problem of off cuts or not cutting all the way through,No matter what that piece ends up as, it cannot be used again.
I don’t believe this is considered a glitch, I think the idea is to keep us from potentially starting a fire, but they will see your post in any case.
And if there’s a problem with the machine, it might mean another round trip. Sorry, I hope not. I believe I’d try to manually remove the sticky on the fan, (without using additional sprays and further complicating the situation first), and see if I could get it running smoothly again.
I wonder if some of the woods you’re cutting aren’t junking the fan up with resins, making more frequent maintenance a necessity. Some of the cheap plywoods seemed to have some mighty nasty glues.
I certainly hope there’s nothing that would junk up the fan after three uses. If there is, we should be warned to not use it.
I have to agree with @rbtdanforth on this. There has to be a better way than having the entire project shut down. The GF could pause with an alert that you could override, presumably watching closely. Once the project has begun, we should be able to attempt to complete it.
That’s what happened to me last week. Just a couple minutes from finishing an almost hour long job. A whole sheet of PG - but it was basswood, I was intending to do a maple version after I verified the prototype worked. No maple PG ended up being burned but I have a piece of steel queued up for the plasma cutter for the backup project. Should teach me to try to get ahead of holidays
This is what went wrong with my third GF. I watched it run through a few jobs when I was troubleshooting, and the fan was actually stopping pretty frequently, but the software appeared to wait to shut the print down until it had stopped and stayed stopped for a certain period of time.
Not sure that’s of any real comfort, but it does at least seem to have some “forgiveness” built in.
There were a couple square inches of Poplar to make a lion pendant. There was the cube lamp in Cherry I posted about and some oak scraps that engraved about 3 square inches before shutdown. I am happy they are of the oak that is no real loss but I was barely able to recover the cherry of the lamp and not have to toss that. Had it stopped in the middle of a long engrave as it did in the oak then it would be trash.
I used the hand cleaner to save the system many times when it was really thick and horrid and that is actually more dust than I have seen anywhere else but almost laughably little of it.
I am just now running a file called exercise which just runs the head back and forth across the front at the lowest power setting and it is doing so without a fan shutdown But that does not solve the problem Unless I can know that the cut will not do half a job and just stop it is a permanent “one Gotcha!” Handicap
@Dan Please let me know when I can resume doing work with things I can be assured will finish.
I’m so sorry for the trouble with those prints. I’ve taken a look at the logs from your Glowforge to investigate the prints in question. I don’t believe your unit will encounter this issue again, but I’ve passed your report on to the team. If you do run into this again, please start a new new thread or email us at support@glowforge.com and we’ll be happy to look into it.
