Foam Cutter Moves Like A Hot Knife Through Butter

Make sufficient makes an attempt to cut foam employing regardless of what you’ve obtained — utility knife, hacksaw, serrated plastic knife — and you’ll desire tough for anything that cuts cleaner, quicker, and much better. While there are all kinds of approaches to build a scorching wire foam cutter, this style and design from [jasonwinfieldnz] is equally exciting and imitable.

If you don’t now know it, nichrome wire is nifty things that’s readily obtainable in thrift retailer hair dryers and toasters. It stretches as it heats up, and shrinks as it cools back again down.

The fascinating portion of this construct is that as an alternative of utilizing a spring to keep pressure on the nichrome wire, [jasonwinfieldnz] made and 3D-printed a bow out of PLA that does the work elegantly. Although [jason] was originally worried that the bow may well probably melt, he identified in follow that while the bow does get warm to the touch, it is nowhere around incredibly hot plenty of to even warp.

A person pleasant contact is the uncomplicated fence that rides together two slots and secures with wingnuts. We also like that [jason] designed this foam cutter mostly from scrap substance, and relatively than buy a spool of nichrome, he opted for a skinny heating ingredient and pillaging the wire.

If you’re a nichrome noob, know that it doesn’t take considerably juice to do the occupation. Even nevertheless a personal computer electric power offer is what [jason] experienced lying all around, it is entire overkill, so you would certainly want to limit the recent. Check out the build video clip following the split.

Even now not moveable sufficient for you? All you seriously will need is a 18650, some nichrome, and a couple of bits and bobs to keep it all alongside one another.