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.