We ran a pledge drive regarding a laser cutter earlier this year, but the next step never ended up happening because of the move to the new location.
I’m starting it back up again and would like to gauge interest from the community about purchasing such a unit. For more information about the laser cutter itself, please visit the wiki page: https://wiki.makehackvoid.com/purchase:laser_cutter
I’ve reset the pledge table given it was quite a while ago and would appreciate people going in and editing in what they will be able to contribute.
We need to continue the discussion around safety and operators of the unit and based on the last committee meeting I was at, I think that at a minimum any trained operator for the laser cutter should be added to the key rotation for the space and be rostered on to assist in making the cutter available as much as the community want to use it.
I’m open to proposals how we might handle this, and once we’ve purchased the unit we will be adding hardware interlocks to make sure only trained operators use the machine.
Additionally of note is that any pledges made here can also be considered prepayment for machine time but do not provide priority access.
We need more pledges if we are going to go ahead with this purchase. If you can afford to contribute, please add your pledge to the wiki page. Note that pledges act as prepayment for machine time one we have the laser cutter.
@Andreas I installed that plugin, but I can’t get it to work
Current total pledges is $2,957 - still need more people to support the purchase.
@merk has passed the information about where he was up to back to @devdsp, @jambulance and me, he doesn’t have time at the moment to help arrange the purchase.
All,
Just FYI, there’s a “Stronger Communities Program” That offers community not-for-profit entities between $5000 and $20000 for small capital projects. This might be a source of additional funding for a laser cutter, but it looks like it’s a bit of a stretch. The requirement is that organisations match funding 1:1, so I presume we’d have to find $5000 from somewhere (The existing pledge page totals about $3300 & I expect some of those pledges have gone stale). But if we pulled it off we’d have $10000 to play with. Submissions close 11-Sep. I’ll try to contact the Local Member’s office for some more details, but what details exist are here:
So I had a bit of a better read of the website and it looks like it “does what it says on the tin”:
MVH would have to raise $5,000+ and the Government will match that, if the proposal is approved.
$10,000 is more than we were planning to spend on the printer, so maybe this could be thought of as a “General workshop refresh”? That we we don’t have to just focus on the printer and any other things that need updating/replacing could be rolled-in too?
If we were to put $5,000 of community funds toward this stronger communities grant, we could double our money and raise $10,000 to buy other items. I would seriously advocate a more n00b-friendly 3D printer. We get lots of interest from casual visitors and infrequent users of the space to get help with these printers, which are sometimes easy to fire up and sometimes not. I know MakerBot is popular, but another great option I nearly pulled the trigger on at work is the Ultimaker 2:
At the time (~18 months ago) the ultimaker seemed to have substantially faster print speed compared to MakerBot (and the then-new model of MakerBot at the time seemed to have mixed reports on quirks that are likely sorted out by now).
This grant could also cover a nice new projector or large television for group presentations and viewing of recorded conference talks, which we are also actively, currently agonizing over
FWIW, I have a $100 discount on a Glowforge cutter valid until the 23rd of October (referral bonus). Some enterprising people on list who have their own e-mail domains may have provided “optimal information” to the referral system (Read: “Gamed it”) to get a higher discount. If buying one in the next 3 days is an option I stand-ready to offer my discount (and urge others with higher discounts to do so too). However I think the time-window’s too small again.
I also recommend getting a less uppity 3D printer.
Having bought a test print from Dangerous Prototypes’ “Dirty SLA” (http://dev.dangerousprototypes.com/store/print3d), I wonder if something like the opensourced Autodesk Ember might be an option? $6k-ish.
The DirtySLA print was great.
I wasn’t suggesting the Ultimaker was uppity, I was agreeing that something better than the uppity printers we have would be good. IMHO all the cheaper/DIY printers tend to be uppity to some degree. I have a Deltaprintr at home, which was a fun toy to build and produces decent enough output, but it certainly has a certain amount of “uppitiness” to it.
…and then another cool printer technology is SLA (Because of the very fine results in comparison to FDM). Autodesk recently opensourced their Ember printer, which seems like a decent choice.
Nevertheless I would be happy with just getting the Ultimaker.
I’m not wedded to the Ultimaker, it just seemed like a good option at that price point… when the $AUD was worth a lot more than it is now at least I would happily accept other recommendations for decent printers. My only concern with going “all in” on very expensive capital items is that I would prefer to see much greater support and/or interest leading up to that level of investment; to help justify that level of investment (worst-case scenario: we spend big, and then it’s grossly underutilized).
I will E-mail the other committee members now and see if a last-minute decision can be made on the glowforge purchase.
I’ve E-mailed everyone participating in this thread, but for archival purposes here is the message: Given that the cutter procurement efforts have been long stalled, the Committee is currently awaiting for a unanimous decision before pulling the trigger on a Glowforge basic w/Air filter: http://glowforge.com/tech-specs/
It’s also only roughly $4,000 AUD after shipping and GST, but only for a few more days, in case you’re
wondering why we’re rushing into this decision: it’s currently cheap enough that we don’t need to rely on member pledges.
The basic model is a Class 1 laser product, requiring no special operator skills or training. This greatly simplifies things and better suits the realities of our current membership attendance.
To get the best possible value for money for the community, this has to be done ASAP as the Glowforge is currently discounted 50% but not for much longer.
The disadvantage with this unit is that it is smaller and less powerful than the requirements discussed on the wiki, see http://glowforge.com/tech-specs/:
40W vs 150W desired
300x500mm work area vs 900×600 desired
handles material up to 13mm vs 12mm desired (“Thickness: Varies by material; can cut most 1/4″ (6mm) plywood and acrylic on one side; twice as thick by reversing and cutting from both sides with optical alignment”)
