Glowforge User Interface: Overview and walk thru

[@boan71]

Tom, thanks for your video. Very useful. When operating in manual mode how do you know what settings to set if you have normal non-proofgrade materials? If I want to do an engraving on a piece of wood for example I have no idea how fast or what intensity to set up. How do you tell it how deep you want the engrave to be? If you want a shallow engrave vs a deep one how do you set that up? What does the FOCUS HEIGHT refer to? and number of passes? When would you set it to 1 vs 3?. Lines per inch?.... Finally how do you separate the different steps and why would you separate them? I'm guessing one step for engraves, one for score and another one for cut. Whey not do all the scores in a single step on the example you show?

[@imagineform]

Lots here. I am planning on doing some more videos that will answer most of these. If you haven’t gone yet check out the glowforge forum and look for the matrix, lots of great info there.

[@Fiestafunjumps]

Hello, how can I do shapes / circles / squares / tracing logo shapes around and make the machine cut it ?

[@imagineform]

You can draw them and then select the white area around it to cut or what I like to do is have some basic shapes saved as SVG files and import them into the work space as needed and scale them to what I need

[@stevenpitts6290]

I'm in the process of getting a glowforge for my business. I'm going to be using my back stock of material that I have but wanted to know what where I can get some of the white stick paper that covers the material in your video. I know that is material purchased through glowforge but want to use my own back stock material up before purchasing glowforge material

[@imagineform]

It’s called transfer paper or transfer tape, you can get it from amazon and probably craft stores, I get mine from a sign supplier. It’s the same stuff they use for vinyl graphics transfer.

[@stevenpitts6290]

Awesome thanks Just what I was looking for :)

[@justinlarson5918]

So have you have problems cutting more detailed projects you said you may get an error if it's too big?

[@imagineform]

I haven't run into it yet, but I think for now the limit is about a 3 hr engrave, so if it is bigger than that you may have to break it up into sections, Most things I make are vectors so not an issue so far with me, My largest engrave was 2 hr 45 min

[@craigdarpino6072]

What is the difference between score and engrave?

[@imagineform]

+Craig Darpino score is like cutting but not all the way through, it can be very light or go really deep, it follows a vector line. An engrave burns all the space in an enclosed vector or a bit map image. Scores are fast, engraves take a bit of time.

[@craigdarpino6072]

Thank you for the reply. I am really anxious to see more videos with this machine. Ive been on the fence for a while and have been hearing some negative things but fortunately not many. I am curious to see what kind of experience you have with it.

[@theunlivingroom8261]

Hehe Forge-O-Matic