CNC Hotwire Foam Cutter Up and Running!

[James_Truong]

The FABLAB has gained a new machine!

The CNC hotwire foam cutter is a 4 axis machine that uses a heated piece of wire to melt through foam blocks to accurately produce foam parts. The cutter turns simple DXF files into extruded foam parts using HWFF software to generate g-code.

Some of the applications include:

• Aerofoils
• Simple composite molds
• Signs

[Kenneth]

@James_Truong Excellent! Let’s discuss for next step.

[zach]

We recently used this machine to cut shapes out of XPS foam, AKA ‘blue board’. The working piece was approx 1000mm on the wire axis.

These settings seemed to work the best for smoothness of cut:

Parameter	Value
Material	XPS Foam
Material Size	1000mm on wire axis
Feed Rate	350mm / min (F350 in G code)
Wire Power	55V / 3A
Wire Diameter	0.4mm
Kerf Size	1.0mm

Adjusting drawings for kerf is critical to getting the correct piece size. There did not seem to be a kerf feature in the hotwire controller or vector linker software so we added this manually to a solidworks drawing using the ‘offset entities’ sketch tool.