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If you’ve spent any time on Etsy, you’ve probably come across crafts made with a laser cutter. For sellers who have to cut wood, leather, or acrylic in bulk, Glowforge laser cutters are a mainstay, but previous models have been prohibitively expensive for hobbyists. The new Glowforge Aura has now delivered a perfect middle ground.
The laser cutter starts at $1,199 for a 12-inch by 12-inch working area. That’s considerably larger than most cheaper hobbyist laser cutters, and considerably cheaper than most larger laser cutters. For comparison, even Glowforge’s own next step up, the Glowforge Plus, retails for $5,000. But with this new entry into the hobbyist space, Glowforge has set a new standard for consumer-friendly laser cutters.
If you’re not familiar with using a laser cutter, it can be intimidating. You’re dealing with lasers powerful enough to cut through up to a quarter-inch of wood. It’s reasonable to be a little nervous. And yet, I’d feel comfortable recommending the Glowforge Aura to someone with absolutely no experience with a laser cutter.
Setting up the Aura is straightforward. Most of it is already assembled in the box, and once you take the laser head out of its foam and place a couple trays in the print bed, you’re pretty much ready to go. If you opt for the Glowforge Personal Filter (an extra $399, more on that below), it connects via an exhaust tube and plugs into the wall with a power cord, and pairs automatically via Bluetooth with the Aura. In fact, the air filter setup was so seamless I wasn’t sure I’d done it right until I began my first print.
While the print bed has a 12 square-inch workspace, two trays on the side fold out, allowing you to insert wider material to slide through. This isn’t just convenient; it can also be a massive money saver. Many of Glowforge’s own Proofgrade materials come in oversize variants that are vastly cheaper. For example, this Walnut Hardwood either costs $20 for a 6-inch by 12-inch board (72 square inches), or $32 for an 8-inch by 36-inch board (288 square inches) with four times the printable area.
Inside the print area, there’s a small camera embedded in the center of the top cover. This serves double duty, helping to align the laser head before each cut, but also to show a view of the material in your print bed to help line up your designs.
If the easy hardware setup was all the Glowforge Aura brought to the table (besides its price) it would already earn our recommendation, but it's actually the software where the laser cutter truly stands out. Glowforge has a robust library of community projects that you can either purchase individually, or get access to in bulk with a Glowforge Premium subscription (there are thousands to choose from).
Pick a design and you can instantly drop it into the Glowforge interface. If your Aura is plugged in and online, you’ll see the design overlaid on top of a picture of the material inside your laser cutter. You can drag the design around to line it up on the material and make sure you’re using it as efficiently as possible.
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Designs are made of vector images and different colors are used to designate distinct layers that can be cut, scored, or engraved. Glowforge offers a free Gift of Good Measure design for a keychain with a 2-inch ruler that doubles as a way to demonstrate all three modes. Cutting will cut all the way through the material, scoring adds small cut lines that don’t go all the way through a material, and engraving will burn text or designs into the material.
Glowforge sells its own Proofgrade materials that are designed to work with its laser cutters. Each material comes with a QR code on the front, which the camera in your Aura uses to automatically determine what settings to use for each material. This probably isn’t the most cost-effective way to buy materials if you plan to mass-produce items, but if you want to take the guesswork out of your projects, it’s as simple as you can get.
Despite simplifying so much work, the Glowforge Aura is still accessible for power users. You can make your own designs in a vector app like Adobe Illustrator and set custom cutting settings for whatever material you buy, as long as you don’t mind experimenting with some excess material.
The Glowforge Aura can cut through a wide variety of materials, including wood, leather, acrylic, paper, and even certain types of iron-on vinyl, to make custom T-shirts. Those materials are all things you don’t want to inhale when you burn them. You wouldn’t want to use the Aura on its own in a small home or common area.
The Personal Air Filter, however, changes all that. It pairs wirelessly with the Glowforge Aura and filters the air that comes out of the laser cutter. Once it’s set up, you’ll barely even know it’s there. It doesn’t add much noise to the experience, and it captures most of the smoke and particles that your prints produce. In practice, I noticed a slight campfire-ish smell while cutting some wood projects, but much less than I would without the filter.
Without an air filter, you wouldn’t want to use this thing outside of a garage, or at least a workshop that can easily vent out a window. With it, it’s possible to use your Aura indoors in just about any room. It’s not strictly a necessary add-on, and given its price you might want to consider finding somewhere well-ventilated first, but if you can spare the expense, the air filter is incredibly convenient.
At $1,199, the Glowforge Aura is firmly outside impulse-buy territory. But it’s inexpensive enough to consider as a tool for an extremely user-friendly hobby or a side hustle. The costs can start to add up if you want to go all out with the air filter, premium subscription, and, of course, the materials. But the simplicity of the entire process, start to finish, makes it a really appealing tool that justifies the expense.
Correction on August 8, 2023: We've clarified that the Aura can work with certain types of iron-on vinyl.
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