I am interested in any comments from model railroaders that have used the hotwire? Does the woodland scenics hotwire cutter work on extruded foam (pink). Or is there a better recommendation that anyone has. Thank you.
Dave
It will work on pink, blue and white foam, extruded or expanded. It works well but keep in mind that you can only cut a few inches in from the edge of the sheet since the cutter has a closed frame. For cuts closer to the middle of the sheet I just use a saw or Xacto knife, but you could use a hot knife also.
Yes. I bought a different one, don’t remember its name. It held a variety shapes, I liked the 1 inch square wire the best. It takes a little practice and a lot of patience. I prefer a steak knife for most cutting and carving, yet, when I was carving hoodoos for Yellowstone canyon, the knife was superior.
I’ve got the WS wire cutter, and I use it on pink foam. For what it does, it’s fine, but it only cuts about 6 inches into the foam. For deeper cuts, I’ve found that cutting lines on each side as deep as you can with a knife and then snapping off the remainder works prettty well. If I had it to do over, I’d by a “hot knife” that doesn’t have the 6-inch limit of the wire cutter.
I bought one of the WS hotwire cutters when they first came out. It’s the only WS product I’ve owned, used or seen that was substandard. It cut fine in 1" blue foam but anything else was a disaster. The arms were not strong enough to resist the force necessary to cut/melt through the foam and would twist or rotate in protest.
I have used one of the hot knives from Micro Mark with no trouble. I would recommend that over the WS hotwire cutter.
My 2¢
Roger
My question is if you are able to cut the Foam with a hot wire and have it as trackbed so I dont have to buy WS foam roadbed or Cork roadbed.
A nice contour would be sweet…trace out your track and have INSTA ditches.
let me know
This comment is from other threads: seems that a lot of modelers who’ve worked with foam prefer to use a steak knife rather than the hot wire knife–apparently works very smoothly.
Jim
Hi Dave,
I have quite a bit of experience with foam cutting and hotwires, as I also build and fly RC airplanes ( sailplanes) and we use foam core wings etc.
I have also made various wings for 1/4 and 1/3 and 1/5 scale model planes for my buddies.
We also cut engine cowlings, and entire fuselages out of foam.
I helped a friend cut and build a B-25 entirely out of foam, it has a 10 foor wingpan and is huge.
I have a smaller foam cutter like the Woodland Scenics, and also a foam cutter made by Tekoa company.
The one I have is called a “gravity cutter” using an arm that pivots with a weight attached, and also have several size bows and all the Tekoa accesories for my outfit.
It really comes in handy for large cuts etc, and have used it on several layouts making various kinds of scenery out of foam.
So it does double duty for me.
Tekoa’s website is www.tekoa.com/
The unit comes with the powr supply etc.
But you can become a guest member of RC Groups on the net and browse the many types of homemade foam cutters guys have come up with.
They are fairly simple to build, and you can use anything from a auto battery charger to various modified power supplies.
Cutting wire can be made from nichrome wire to various diameters of welding wire like .035.
A simple cutting bow can be made in various sizes from a simple pi
Forgot to mention that as long as you are handy with power tools, a saber saw with a fine tooth blade will do a nice job of cutting foam also, but leaves a bit of foam dust.
My Tekoa hot wire bows are 28 inches wide, 38 inches wide and 50 inches wide, so using a table I have with one end set up to hot wire foam, I can cut 4x8 pieces of foam width wise with no problem.
A hot wire as long as you have a guide for the wire to travel along does a very smooth cut!
Good luck!
Ed
No, most of the cutters are for pretty large-scale work. They don’t handle details like that very well. I have just gouged out some drainage ditches with a knife, and then I put WS foam roadbed down for the tracks. I think you’d spend an awful lot of time trying to cut foam to actually use as roadbed.
Yes it can be done.BUT you will need to use a smaller hand held cutter
What you will need to do is make a set of templates from formica resembling the angles of your roadbed.
First cut a piece of foam basically lengthwise and make it basically a long rectangular piece and at the thickness you want your roadbed to be
Then lay a flat piece of formica as wide as you want the top of your roadbed.
Place this on top of the long rectangular piece of foam, and either weight it down, or use some two sided sticky tape to temporarily attach it.
Don’t press it down too much, just where it will stick while you cut, then carefully lift it off after your cut.
Same on the bottom piece you will use for your template.
Then place another piece of formica under the foam which will be as wide as you want your roadbed to be at the bottom.
Take your hot wire cutter, and starting with one side of your roadbed, cut your side angle all the way down one side as long as you want your foam roadbed, with the wire simply sliding along the edge of the upper and lower templates.
Then do the same thing on the other side.
You may have to experiment with the pieces you cut as to how flexible they will be, in bending around a radius, then glue them end to end.
Give it a try, it should work.
It may just take some patience and experimenting, but it should work!
To give you an idea what your templates would look like. Imagine TWO yard sticks laying side by side, one is simply wider than the other.
Formica works, also aluminum will work, even thin plywood as long as the edges are REAL SMOOTH!!!
Otherwise the wire can hang up on nicks in the template.
I am trying to figure out how Bergie explained about posting pictures.
Wish it was as easy as it is on a couple of other forums I use.
You just uplink a file.
I read Bergies explanation, but maybe I’m a dummy, I still don’t undersatnd how to do it.
I don’t have a personal website or webpage, just pictures stored in files in “My Documents”
and another folder “My pictures”.
Otherwsie I’d post some drawuings and pictures of what I am trying to explain.
If anyone has a simpler explanation than Bergies, I’d appreciate knowing about it.
Thanks,
Ed
Okay this hopefully will work.
This is a picture of basically how you would place your templates on the top and bottom of a rectanglar faom strip and cut it with a hand held foam cutter, sliding the wire down the edges of the templates to get your angled sides.
hmmm, it did not work.
I have followed every step to the “t”, am I missing something?
What am I doing wrong?
I am using Mozilla Firefox browser, and I don’t know if it’s my browser
or the photobucket site I uploaded my picturse to.
I go to photobucket, right click on the URL for the picture,then click on copy
then
When I come back onto MR forum, and type
all I get is the little picture icon with the 3 colored dots in it. [img]
Maybe I’ll give Shutterbug a try instead.
I have some diagrams for sharing how to cut roadbed from pink foam, but if I can’t get this picture post to work, I can’t share them.
I have been reading the different explanations for posting pictures, been trying each one, but it just isn’t working…
update-called a computer tech buddy of mine and he said it probably wont work with Firefox and the Windows 98 Pro Lite this PC uses, as this computer uses a special edition of windows not available to the ordinary user.The advantage of using this program is it allows my 400Mhz PC to run at 1.2 gig performance without overclocking the processor, since he built this PC.It does allow me to run software that would oterwise require a much newer PC.
Suggested I try Shutterbug
TheK4Kid
LOL