OP827 wrote:Philip, the hot wire foam cutting flash with wood looks pretty good and flat from here.
I may steel the idea for the future. Anything you recommend I should be watching for when doing the cut, any lessons learned?
Thanks,
Oleg
You need to maintain a steady speed threw the cut. If you slow down it will leave a divot. If you look at the foam in the pic any dark lines in it was a slow down point.
A good power supply helps. My charger only supplied 12 volts with maybe one amp. There wasn't enough resistance to fully turn on my charger. It was only giving me voltage and no amperage. So it was slow cutting. My power supply that died was giving me three amp's.
Rig a spring up on the cutter wire to hold tension. I didn't on that adjustable setup I made. NI-chrome wires stretches a lot when hot even at the low amp's I was feeding it. With the wire tight at the start of the cut. By the end of a cut the center of the wire was about 2" behind in the center of the span. A larger power source would have helped there. If I slowed down to keep the wire straight it caused divots on the outer edges.
It was a flush cut with top of wood. On the alumin ears I added to the clamp. I put a notch just deep enough in the rounded corner to just hold the wire in position. I'll get a better pic of the working end tomorrow. I wasn't quite done with it when I took that one.