"Your material must be less than 0.5” tall with the tray in, or between 1.5” and 2” with the tray out."

I just setup our Glowforge and we got really close to finally printing something today, but received this warning instead:

“Your material must be less than 0.5” tall with the tray in, or between 1.5” and 2” with the tray out.”

I’ve read other forums about people fixing this error –

  1. Some said to make sure the red laser pointed to the wood, not too far to the edge. It doesn’t look like the laser is at the edge on our print.

  2. Some said they had to run through the power cycles and recalibrate four times. I’ve done that almost a dozen times today. It still isn’t working.

  3. Someone mentioned it might be the image we’re using, but I am just trying one of the pre-made designs on the Glowforge catalog.

Any help appreciated!

What material are you using? Is it flat on the crumbtray, and not on the side lips?

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Maybe check to make sure the windows at either side of the lens are clean. One produces the red spot and the other has a camera that uses the spot to measure height.

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I’m using one of the sample pieces that the glowforge came with - Medium Basswood Plywood, so it fits perfectly in the crumbtray.

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You’re referring to the windows on the laser box, right? I wiped all of those down and am still getting the error response.

Hang on…this is going to require some screen shots, but don’t go away, i need to ask a couple questions…

When you open a file in the Worksheet, do you have the material type showing at the top of the thumbnail column, or does it list Unknown there?

The material type shows up - it’s reading the code correctly.

Yeah, that was what I was wondering. I’m afraid you’re probably going to have to hear from Support on this one. They can look at the metrics for the individual machine and see what is going on better than we can…we can only guess. :neutral_face:

Unfortunately, it looks like your unit is experiencing an issue that we can’t resolve remotely. I want you to have a reliable unit, so I’m recommending we replace this one. I’ll be in touch via email to sort out the details. I’m so sorry about the bad news.