I have just got hold of some fantastic Styrofoam sheets - "Roofmate" manufactured by the DOW company. The only situation is that, these sheets are 1 inch (25mm) thick, Length 1150mm X 600 mm (approx 4ft by 2 ft).

I now need to slice these sheets into 6mm thickness, which will result in 4 sheets from every parent sheet. With this mind, I have started building my own Hot Wire Cutter. I know that there are many threads devoted to this subject on this forum, however, my query and my model are different. While the majority of threads talk about the material being stationary and the cutter being moved, I propose to build it the other way.

The Depron/ Styrofoam sheet slides into the hot wire and is manually pushed/ pulled all the way till a 6mm layer comes off, then the process is repeated again. For every sheet of 25 mm thickness, this process is repeated 4 times resulting in 4 sheets of styrofoam 6 mm thick.

I need some help here -

1. Will this work and result in an uniform cut or is this design impractical?

2. How do I keep the wire taught right through the cut?

Experts on this subject like Rao Garu, please advise.

Please don't ask me where I got the sheets from and how much I paid for them - those queries may be addressed to Anam.

Regards,

VC

Hello VC bhai,
I just drew a simple table foam cutter on paint
l suppose you can use something like this to make your cuts.
You probable may need rectangle PVC pipes to make a guide and the rest is pretty self explainatory.
Don't know if it may come handy, but you know a human mind!! it can adapt and give you brighter ideas during the build!

regards,

Dorwin

I would strongly suggest to 'Spring Load' The Nichrome wire. That is, stretch the nichrome wire between springs on the either ends. With heat the Nichrome/Piano/Guitar wire would expand. The springs would compensate this slackness in wire and still render the wire in tension again.

Please dont forget to put some weight on the sheet while it slides through. It makes the sheet stable and perfect horizontal all through its path orelse distortion occurs.

Yes! I agree with both of you'll...
the nichrome wire does expand and will slack in the process and as merog said, distortion will cause mostly due to 2 reasons, the first being the hand/sliding movement and the second the correctness of the baseplate.
So, VC Bhai! the more straight and aligned your movable plate is the closer you will get to achieving a 6mm cut.

Thanks everybody! Just got some springs organised to keep the slack. Now let's see how it all pans out.

Hooray! It works. I've kept it simple and now need to fine tune it. Need to experiment with different wire thicknesses to see what works best. To start with, I used guitar wire and achieved neat cuts. Now I need to experiment with thinner wire. The frame is a bit wobbly and needs reinforcement, however, the design works. Thanks everybody!

Spring loaded.

congraulations VC,
looks promising!
hope all your cuts are smooth...hehe

VC sir, can you post a small video of this thing in action?

Hi VC,

Nice work. Please add few words about the power supply. I have seen 2 switches connected, is it for toggling between 6V / 12V? Also, waiting for the video

Regards
Dileep