Glowforge: Unboxing, Setup & First Cut!

hi guys Debbie here today we're going to unbox and set up a glowforge basic glowforge is a laser cutter primarily used for wood and acrylic however it can be used on a wide variety of items some of which are we have wood fabric leather paper plexi glass or acrylic Delrin or ISA tall mylar rubber core in food like a pumpkin pie if you haven't watched their video yet they have a little like trailer of things that I can do to try to kind of show you some things and they engrave a design on top of a pumpkin pie which is cool haven't done that yet it can also engrave on glass coated metal marble aluminum titanium some phones we did my daughter's iPhone but it has to be one of them it's like a painted aluminum eye surface not the newer glass ones same thing with tablets laptops Mac books there's a whole list more information on their website which I will link to in the description of the video but basically a glowforge is a really cool toy that can open up a whole new world of crafting addictions for you and/or your business but today I wanted to show you how to unbox and set one up I got my first glowforge in December I believe when we're end of March right now so I've had it for getting close to four months a couple months in okay we're gonna say like three months in the laser on my claw forge stopped firing there just wasn't anything happening something happened to it some sort of bug but I went through the customer service process with glowforge told him what was happening they had me do some troubleshooting steps and they determined that it was something that I can fix and because they have a great warranty where they just ship you out a new one they shipped me out a new one so I thought this was the perfect opportunity for me to do an unboxing and setup video since have already done it before I thought about doing one when I opened up my first glowforge but I didn't know what I was doing I didn't think that was fair to have you guys follow along when it was my first time figuring it out too so this is the second time I'm setting up a glowforge and so I'm going to show you guys how to do it okay so if this is your first glowforge you should have received two boxes one of which is obviously the big giant one here with the main machine the other one is a smaller I believe it was white a white box they didn't reship that to me with my replacement they had me hold on to the items that were in that box so I could just reuse those so if you had two boxes we're only going to work with them the big one right now the smaller box comes with some some samples of materials I believe you get a few sheets of the draft board and some proof grade plywood and some acrylic I got a little piece of leather and some walnut so they give you I believe at $75 worth of materials to play with when you first get your machine up and running in that box there's also a dryer vent hose and your crumb tray which these are from my old machine I just how long to them like I said earlier so the first thing we're going to do is get the machine out of the box safely and get it up on the table so we can move on to the next step okay so before we actually start taking apart the box I'm just disclaimer here keep all of your packing materials if you do need to do a warranty claim and send your machine back they will charge you like two hundred and fifty dollars to get a replacement box and styrofoam and such but so hold on to these until your warranty is up for the basics I believe it's a six month warranty and then for the other two higher models they're longer on the state's a year but don't quote me on that I'll look that up so anyway to save all of your packing materials okay I wanted to show you up close real quick on these little handle locks these go through both boxes to help hold the boxes together and they're a little bit tricky to get off without breaking and I noticed this when I was mailing back my warranty one that I did end up breaking one so try to be careful not to be too rough but there's a little tab here you pull on that tab the center should pull out then you can reach in and just pull that out so save this with all your packaging materials and you just have to go around and do that on all four he knows [Music] [Music] okay so once you get your foot forge out of the box make sure that you kind of think through a little bit on where you want to put it McClure porch needs to be able to vent out a window it does cause some fumes and some smoke more or less depending on what exactly you're doing but you can't just let it run without event make sure that you're near a window if you cannot get near a window they do offer a fan for an inside filter that you can use without having one window the general consensus I've heard from that one is for the price it costs to replace the filters for it do everything you can to find a window de vente of those filters are not cheap to replace and they fill up pretty quickly so I'm trying to find a window but that is an option if you do not have somewhere where you can set it up here our window in order to vent it but I will show you that when we get to that stage besides having to go for too close to a window the next most important thing is the surface you decide to put it on make sure that you put it on a sturdy surface with room to get near an outlet not a power strip or an extension cord you need to plug this directly into an outlet and the table needs to be level so if you don't know for sure go ahead and put a level on it just check if it's not level the door will not fall how it's supposed to and I'll rub and catch so you need the machine itself three levels so but level on your table before you do that these are steps that I've already done since this is the second one I'm setting up but if this is your first you want to check and make sure that the table is plenty strong to hold the weight of this because this is not light and that it's level before you start setting it up okay moving on to the step of actually taking all of the packing material out of the machine itself get a ziplock or an envelope or a little box or something you need to save all of these pieces in case you need to do a warranty claim and mail it back so make sure you save all of these little pieces we're gonna pull out here so the first thing we need to do is pull off this tape on the front so that we can open up the lid now you don't have to save the tape obviously that's not moving too much to save I'm just holding onto my plastic bag for some of these pieces we're gonna be pulling onto so you take the tape off then you can open up the lid and get into the inside here once inside we're going to pull out the foam blocks so we can get to all the important parts on the inside save the foam blocks over here and let's see if I could zoom in just a little bit you can see these little orange and orangish red knobs and rubber pieces you need to take these knobs off so that it unlocks the arm here and just unscrew them completely I mentioned earlier now back here you'll see the printer head is in this phone just go ahead and leave it there for now we will come back to that carefully pull this foam out if this is your first flow Forge not a replacement the power cord should be inside this little pocket here that's where it would be just so to decide we will get to that later the next thing we want to do is remove this tape from the arm now be careful because this tape is holding up important tape that you don't want to hurt so you'll see it right down here there's this little bit of white electrical well it's not electrical tape but it's got wiring in there so you don't want to hurt that but we need to take the tape off of that white wire strip there and just let that rest inside that arm now we could pull off this orange lock right here and you just kind of pull out and down at the same time to unhook it from the lip there and then just pull that off put this in your zip lock stuff to save and then over here on the sides these last two orange tabs as you push on this you'll be able to pull the tabs out and save these little silicone tabs too now we're going to push the whole arm all the way back don't force anything but it should slide pretty easily and we're going to put the crumb tray in so we're gonna put in the crumb tray which means you need to lower this front door here is the crumb tray on the front of it there is a little handle it's going to be on the front and the top so you know which way it needs to go in there's also a larger black smooth plastic part towards the back that will go back under the arm so all you do is you slide it in and there's actually some little grooves on the bottom that will fit inside well if you could see this but there's some little grooves in the corners so you'll feel it kind of rest inside those and then it won't shift side-to-side if you've got it in the right place and it does kind of look like this front lip is sticking out in the way but the way the door is designed it'll close right back up without having to worry about that so now you have your chrome tray in there okay so now we're gonna put the printer head in we've already got the arm pushed all the way back I'm just going to go ahead and slide this over to the right the printer head before we pull it out the most important thing to remember is to not touch anything that's not black on this the the flat black metal is okay there's some lenses on here that you cannot get greasy fingerprints on so carefully pull it out of the phone and you'll see on the side here there's one of the lenses do not grab that with your finger so down here there's a little piece of foam protecting the main lens so what we're going to do the glowforge logo should be facing up make sure your hands are only touching the flat black metal parts and in here we've got the the little wire tape strip that I talked about earlier that needs to snap right into this little connector where there's all these little microchips you carefully push that in until it clicks you hear that click so being careful with this little cord we're gonna move it back over here and the actual printer head is magnetized so it's gonna snap or at once to do you see how it kind of sucks now it's moving the whole thing it's magnetized so it's going to snap right where it wants to be you just have to help guide it now it's it's stuck where it's supposed to be and it's secure you can feel its gonna move back and forth freely that's that's the goal here so it's snapped into place but be able to move freely and secured okay so that's everything we need to do for the inside right now now in order to actually power it up we need to attach the power cord and we need to attach the exhaust so that's we're gonna work on next okay I decided to turn the Machine around for this part so you can have a better view of what's going on back here so on one side you're going to have the exhaust hole the other side you're going to have your power switch and your power plug so I know it's a pretty self-explanatory but the power plug goes right here make sure you push it in all the way and then plug this directly into the wall do not go into a power strip or an extension cord unless you are positive it is rated to handle the power of your laser cutter not all of them are so powerful enough to be able to handle it and you can come shorts and fires and Sparks and all sorts of issues so plants they go directly to the wall okay now for the exhaust this is an important step you want to make sure that you get it sealed as good as possible what they send you is the exhaust to and this little metal spring loop okay so put that spring loop if you press it they'll make it bigger over the exhaust and work it on just a little bit over the first notch there and then while you open that up you want to slide it on to the output here push that foil up as far as you can and then once you put it back far enough you put that little an old clip there make sure that it's got contact all the way around so that that's sealed in you should be able to give it a decent pullin it's not going to go any okay once you have it plugged in directly to the wall and you have your hose hooked up then it's ready to go when you go to actually cut it and use it you have to vent this out the window so until I get my little panel made which will be another video here probably tomorrow in the meantime and I did this even when it was cold and December out I just come in and open and push the hose out and then just pinched it in the window like that and it worked just fine okay now that we have the machine all set up and ready to go I thought that it would be helpful if we went into the first cut together the first thing that I cut and what I feel it just makes perfect sense is called the gift of good measure it's a file that glowforge provides to you for free in their little design space that they have and the reason why I'm gonna go ahead and stick with this as a recommendation is it's one of the few files that you see out there that has all three different cut types so it cuts I guess cut type is muttering word actions it cuts it scores and it engraves so the difference between a score and an engraved is that engrave will do areas like shapes like you can engrave a circle where it's a flat and so for example see this little area right here let soom zoom focus okay this this rectangle right there that is engraved okay these lines are on the outside these thin lines those are called score line for the simplicity of the first project you're going to do this one makes perfect sense because it kind of shows you a little bit of all three things that'll do and the different between that plus it's just kind of a handy little thing to have ruler but I will show you how to get to that we got to move over to the computer for that part before we move on to the steps that we need to do on the computer reach back to the back of the machine next to where you plugged it in and flip that switch for the on button we need it to be on so we can have it connect to the Wi-Fi and make it so we can access it to cut okay so the piece of wood that I recommend using for this little ruler is a piece of the medium draft board that they give you with your machine it's just inexpensive wood and it cuts in engraves very nicely you'll see they're all labeled with a barcode in the name of what it is so you want to find a sheet that says medium a draft board I'm pretty sure that they give everyone some medium draft one this is one that I made ornaments on for my kids to painter on Christmas but we're just going to go ahead and use a blank space on this so to load in would you raise the top here and you just drop it in it'll fit right between the lip on the edge of your crumb tray so it should be flush and pushed back I mean you can even push it forward you've got a little bit of wiggle room there it doesn't really matter you just might be able to reach different areas you'll see on the screen but you just want to put that in make sure to push down all the way so it's not wiggling around in there and then close the machine back up okay after you turn on your machine you want to go to your computer and go to setup dot hello Forge dot-com this will redirect you to a page that basically went over all of the steps that we already did for the video here if you go all the way down to the bottom and feel free to go and make sure that we didn't miss this get a step or anything if you want to just check that over but I was following along so we covered everything on here except for pros but I don't have a pro so we had to skip that part but at the very bottom it says connect to electrical power and turn on your glowforge so we're all caught up to all the steps on this first screen so hit continue and it says you're ready to get connected when the button is teal click continue and we're going to go through the steps to connect it to the Wi-Fi so in order to connect to the temporary Wi-Fi you need to go over here to know this I'm on Mac so it'll be a little bit different depending on your computer but you need to go find new Wi-Fi signals and we're looking for the one that's called blow forge so we see the glowforge showing up on the list over here so we're gonna click on that you can see that it's thinking over here in the corner device found now we need to select the Wi-Fi you want it to be connected to from the list here we just need this list to refresh or load there we go so the Wi-Fi that we want to connect to is Frandsen okay so we connect we successfully connected it I'm going to give my glowforge a different name because I already have a little Forge on my account and I was really unique and I named it glowforge so I want it to have a little bit different name so I'm gonna hit blow Forge - but you can name it something clever obviously okay so glowforge has tons of tutorials you can obviously click through to that I'm going to skip that we're going to go to your dashboard so we can go cut this first file so here's what your dashboard your design library looks like when you first log in - some of these designs here that I've uploaded since this isn't my first full forge I have some things that I've worked on I usually try to keep this kind of clean I'd rather import it when I need it but they do give you some free designs I think they're different every month and so I might not I might not have the same ones that you do but the one that we want to do is this medium draft board gift of good measure they also have one that's metric but I'm going to do the one that's set up for inches okay your screen should be updated with the bed of your glowforge so for me it's that's what I'm looking at was that funny piece with the ornaments cut out of it so the first thing you're gonna see up here is a little warning saying that there's unidentified material in your glow Forge sometimes it'll read it correctly but mine for it rarely does if you come over here to the upper left hand corner it says unknown if you click on that it lets you choose the material that you're working with so we're doing medium draft board or if you're using something different make sure you use the accurate material so I'm going to hit select and I'm going to this place the cut where I want it we're going to move it a little bit just so we could take advantage of my scraps here now just to explain a little bit how this works over here this is a pre-designed file so it has all the settings in here for you but on the left-hand side that's where you would look to see what parts of it are getting cut or scored or engraved so when you click on one of them you'll see all these different settings on here and they're all set up custom don't mess with the settings that they have set up for it just because they've already they've already gone through the process of deciding what is the right settings for all this so keep the defaults for this file once we decide where we want it to be placed I'm going to go ahead and hit the print button now that won't actually send it to start and then we still have to go press the button on the machine itself what I like about that is it gives me time to go put the vent out the window so I'm going to go ahead and hit the print button and it's gonna think through it for a minute and then I'm going to go over and switch to the other camera so we can watch the machine so before we hit the glowing button to have it start cutting you want to make sure that this is vented so see this glowing button right here that glowing button means it's ready on the screen that says we have an estimated time of five minutes and five seconds to cut out our gift of good measure we're going to go ahead and hit the button and let it do its thing [Music] [Music] it's all done now we get to pull it out [Music] just kind of shake it let those little pieces fall from it these little pieces are going to go through the trash [Music] just a final thing to wrap up there are a few tools that I recommend getting your hands on just to make life easier for you with the whole glowforge operation first and foremost lens cleaning wipes um I believe they send you with a couple which is great but you'll go through them any sort of troubleshooting except the first thing that they tell you to do is to make sure all the lenses and the mirrors and a couple of little connection points are all clean and you need lens cleaning wipes for that the zeiss i believe is how you say it is kind of the brand that everybody talks about they used to sell those at Sam's Club my Sam's cup doesn't get those anymore so now I've got these off D plus they work fine you just want to look for lens cleaning wipes these plastic razor blades are really handy to have this was like ten bucks on Amazon and they came with a bunch of replacements which I'm sure I won't go through these plates very often but make it nice to pull off masking tape duct tape also works really well to pull off masking tape just press it on really hard and then peel it up and it'll pull all that little pieces of masking tape off and masking tape this is actually paper transfer tape it's it's the same thing if you're familiar with vinyl you might even have some I think I've heard that there's some that are stickier than others that people like better this one is what I've been using I haven't had any issues just do not use plastic transfer tape or masking tape that will will melt and make fumes that you don't want to deal with it's not good for your machine so make sure it's paper and you just use this to cover I've got one over here waiting because I've got something else I need to cut when we're done here if you're using wood that is not glowforge proof grade wood it won't already be coated so this was wood that I bought in bulk or else not Forge I will provide a link to this as well it is a little bit cheaper and it's actual plywood not that draft board so I I prefer that it's also not coded it doesn't have a veneer or anything on it so it'll take paint so that's the type of wood that I like to use when I'm cutting out things I'm I'm gonna cut out a little name for a little girl today so um I wanted her build paint it so I'm not gonna use the any of the proof grape materials that I have here so I'm gonna use this one but I masked it with the paper first so it keeps those burn marks off of it another thing I almost forgot if you're using something that's not a proof grade material get yourself a caliper you will need to be able to enter in the exact width of the wood and sometimes that varies um I know you can go to Lowe's or Home Depot and buy something that's supposed to be an eighth of an inch but it's not really an eighth of an inch and the machine needs to know exactly how thick it is in order to focus correctly so these are cheap - I want to say was like twelve dollars so get yourself a caliper and lens cleaning wipes those are kind of the two big big things for me but anyway um I hope that this doesn't end up being too long-winded but I wanted to cover all the steps with you guys if you have any questions feel free to let me know and join the group where I share all sorts of random things that I'm making this is one of my designs that I did in January these little interchangeable gnomes so I want to do a video on these showing you how to cut those out but those little arms you could just pull off and put a different one on for different seasons or occasions I like to use a little glue dots instead of the velcro that a lot of people use little velcro dots for these little glue dots or thinner so the the piece doesn't stick off of the gnome quite as far but feel free to join the group Debbie Does design groupies so that you can follow along all the random little things that that we're doing in the group so anyway it's also a great place for questions and so I put all the important information in the description some of you if you need a link to something check that description first cuz that's where I update things in fact I usually send you to the website and I have a written a blog post or something so check the description first and if you got questions feel free to reach out on the website we've got live chat and you could pop in and say hi there too but anyway thanks for watching and I'll see you guys next time [Music]

Channel: Debbie Does Design

Views: 73,653

Keywords: GlowForge, glowforge setup, glowforge unboxing, glowforge how to, glowforge first cut, glowforge gift of good measure, glowforge laser cutter, glowforge laser, glowforge sublimation, glowforge laser printer, glow forge, diy glowforge, glowforge help

Id: LzowiYG8u9M

Length: 32min 34sec (1954 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 02 2020