Hot wire foam wing cutting

This was my first attempt at cutting a foam wing (for Spatman) and it went surprising well!

Looks like excellent results there. Well done and thank you for sharing.

@rong That looks good, what foam are you using and where do you get it? I buy white polystyrene from a company called Ecclestone Hart it is really very cheap.

@pylonuk It is XPS foam which I got from Bluefoam (now called 4D or Modelshop) It is very dense so all I have done when producing wings is to cover it in laminating film!

Was just wondering after the "build your own" ITAT on Tuesday and I have a Stepcraft D840 3 axis milling machine, if anyone had made some attachments to make it into a CNC hot wire cutter for foam wing blanks? Would need to control both ends of the wire of course for wings.

@john-minchell My first CNC router was in fact partly made up from a commercial CNC hotwire wing cutter called Step Four, both machines showed in the photo's, this was back in the mid 1990's. I was still using that router up until about 2017, it was great.

@john-minchell RCKeith Hotwire  Keith has a good series on DIY CNC hot wire cutting machine. I have tried to design and build a 3d printed version. I got it all running just needs some more refinement .... and time

OK thanks for the replies guys.  After watching the recommended series of YT videos by Keith Howlette, the mechanical mods would be OK for me - but a bridge way too far to get a second set of Y and Z axes to work with the existing electronics of the Stepcraft.  Much easier to build a totally separate machine and assemble it on the bench when needed to cut wing blanks then remove and store it when not in use.