If you use foam board on your layout, you may want to consider purchasing or making your own hot wire foam cutter.
Hot wire foam cutters are indeed handy to have when sculpting mountains and cutting foam board into a desired shape.
You don’t have to have a hot wire foam cutter to cut foam board, but I can say from experience, after using one, it makes cutting so much easier, not to mention much more exact than using a box knife or anything else you are using to cut with.
What is a hot wire foam cutter? The cutter uses a combination of a special nichrome wire and an electric current to create heat to melt a very thin layer of foam that you can use to cut the foam into shape. It not only will easily slice through foam board, but any type of Styrofoam as well.
If you’re wondering, you can get it in multiple different configurations, from handheld models to different tabletop models. If you are handy and on a tight budget like I am, you can easily make your own for under $20.00 or less, saving you from having to spend $40.00 and upwards from there.
I will give you the basics on how to build one with most of the things you need that you probably already have.
One of the items you will need to purchase is the nichrome wire. Not just any wire will work because other wires will burn up. Nichrome wire has a nickel alloy in it that will withstand high temperatures and not break. You can get nichrome wire on Amazon for around $5 to $7.00.
You are also going to need a 9-volt power source. You can use a 9-volt battery or a 12V to 9V converter, like you use for your track power. I used an old DC transformer for my power for my small tabletop and a 9V wall plug for my handheld.
Rather than going through a step-by-step process to explain how to build one, I will give you the basics of it, and you can go to YouTube and look up videos on ideas on how to build your own.
The basic idea of the hot wire cutter is taking the positive side of your power source and attaching it to one end of the nichrome wire, and the negative side to the other end of the wire. This will make the wire hot instantly and allow you to cut foam with it. You will also want to add some kind of on/off switch, like a toggle switch, to turn it on and off. You can even use a momentary on toggle, as I did for a handheld. So when you’re ready to cut, you push down on the toggle to engage the unit to cut and release the toggle, and the unit turns off.
That’s it. It is really that simple. Years ago, I bought a hot wire cutter from Lifelike Products. The price wasn’t that cheap, but it was cheaply built and fell apart only after a couple of uses. So I simply threw it in a box and forgot about it for a few years. When I started a new layout, I dug it back out, discarded the broken handle and other parts, took an old non-working hot glue gun, modified it, and added a momentary on toggle switch. Now I had a solid, good-working handheld foam cutter. I also realized I needed a way to make straight, smooth, thin pieces of foam, so I built a small tabletop cutter that only cost me the price of a roll of nichrome wire.
It is very easy to build your own and very budget-friendly because everything I needed, I already had except for the wire.
The hot wire foam cutter is one of my tools that I love using when it comes to building mountains. It saved me from cleaning up tiny pieces of foam, and it cuts so quickly.
The time spent making my foam cutters was well worth it, not to mention it was a budget saver.
Until next time,
Happy foam cutting!
