CNC Hot Wire Cutter

Please sign the roster for this project if you are interested in collaborating!

Who all is interested in contributing to this project? What times work best for you meeting at DMS? What times do NOT work for you meeting at DMS?

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Im very interested and available anytime

Could be fun. Open pretty much anytime but prefer during the working day but not a deal breaker…

You folks realize, this thread is 2 years old…

Actually I did not. Thanks for pointing it out. I just assume that new things that pop up are current.

do you have experience building one. I have one that I had built for me

Not a hot wire system. I have a cnc plasma cutter and I’ve done a couple of cnc mills. Separately, I build a simple wire foam cutter for a project, so I assumed it was just a combination of what I have done before.

Back several years ago I read up on cnc foam cutters. I remember one builder talking about doing semi-CNC if it was for a simple-ish profile like an airfoil. Rather than CNC’ing the foam cutting, use a laser cutter to cut guides/templates for a “dumb” foam cutter. So you cut your airfoil templates and affix them to your foam block, use that to guide the wire.

Same idea goes for CNC routing - if you have a laser cutter and a router with a pattern bit, you can cut patterns from Masonite and make the same types of things you can do on the Multicam (albeit slower and more labor intensive).

This is what some aerospace design teams did at my school. The system was easier to use than the CNC foam cutter we had, and use can even do tapers. You just have to be careful to keep the two ends in sync.

The big issue is the CAM for the hot wire is not generally supported and it wasn’t until we got a very nice machine with a proprietary cam package that it became very useful.