CNC Hotwire 4 axis foam cutter

[mitchejc]

Sorry can't help you with any info on the 4 axis hot wire but Silyavski may have a point depending on what you want to do. If you need to cut a lot of wing profiles rapidly the hot wire is obviously the way to go but if time is on your side then simple 3 axis milling is not such a bad idea as it gives you a lot of options that hot wire can't do. A relatively flimsy but fast 3 axis router dedicated to foam cutting should be easy to build.

Had to dig around to find the model but several years back I did cut a few gliders for a friend on my router. He asked me to cut two wing profiles and I suggested we cut the whole aircraft in one go. The entire model including the fuselage was cut from one big piece of foam with a two sided strategy excluding the wing tips which were glued on afterwards. The screenshots below shows the model I drew using his wing profile. I know sh%t about aerodynamics so I just went with a sort of a teardrop shaped thing for the fuselage so he's got somewhere to put the battery and receiver:-) The white round bits you see on the wings are just supports used when I turned it over to cut the bottom profile. The piece of foam was bigger than the model so it was supported at the wingtips as well.



Don't think I have any pics of the actual cut models but apparently they flew very nicely :-)