Polyfoam Cutter

This project was inspired by an urgent need during my house reconstruction.

I had to cut to size lots of polyfoam tables to cover my ceil of corridor in order to evolve heat insulation. So I made this small machine to help me in this procedure.

In the video you can see it during the cutting progress.

The total cost of this machine stands around $25.

Construction time was about 3-4 hours.

I think the pictures are self-explanatory, but I wrote some instructions to let anyone to do it easily if you need similar tool.

Metal rod (about 1 meter long)

Some wire (about 1 meter long)

Some screws

Power supply (I used 220V/12V 5A)

You can buy cheap instance from ebay here

Motor Speed Control PWM 12V

Cheap PWM controller on ebay

Wooden slat and speed clamps for ruler.

I was welding the metal frame from a 15 mm x 15 mm metal rod. (blue in the pictures). The top part of it is about 55 cm long to allow us to cut a standard sized (50 cm x 100 cm) foam table. The frame is fixed with two screws to the pedestal.

The fundament is a wooden table which has 4 wood pieces to stand on them and ensure the stability. (green legs) The legs are fixed with screws to the pedestal.

Throughout the hole in the pedestal we can fix the heating thread. In order to set accurately the 90 degree I made a long hole for the winged screw, as you can see in the second picture.

On the bottom side I simply turned around the thread over the screws which connect to the power wire.

I used a 12V 5A power supply and a motor control unit. The last one has a built in potentiometer with on/off switch. The heating thread is originated from an old oven (220 V). It contains a spiral what is quite long (more meters) to use it for a long term. I just cut a ~20 cm long piece from it and made it to straight.

If you do not have expendable oven, I think you can make tries with guitar strings.

To make the cutting accurate and straight I use wooden slat tied down with two speed clamps which helps keep on track the polyfoam.

With a ruler from an old tape measure you can positioning easily the slat.

And finally, like it if you liked it :-)