First off; it's been awhile since the last post on the blog, not very much if at all has been going on in my hobby world. But hopefully that will all change soon enough, I've got a lot of projects on the back burner & that keeps growing month to month.
Any ways, this weekend my friend Travis and myself built my first try at a Hot Wire Table. It went as planned for the most part, but like anything else in life there is always room for improvement.
Materials used in the Hot Wire Table where:
- Birch Faced 5 ply Plywood for the frame and overhead arm
- 1/4" Peg Board for the table top
- Kreg Pocket Hole System to tie the frame work together and hide all the fasteners
- Eyelet screws for wire attachment
- Industrial Strength rene based alloy Hot Wire, which is supposed to hold up better then inconel wire.
- And a 6 volt AC Power Supply and connector out my broken Hot Wire Tool (snapped the wire in to cutting the first Modular Terrain section)
- Turn Buckle to provide tension to the arm and the wire
- 1/4" Dowel for the accessories for the table, like the fence to rip straight pieces
The whole deal went together really easy, the plan was based off the Makezine 5 minute Hot Wire Cutter with some improvements on the design. I framed in the base a little more and recessed the peg board in the frame, and added the cross braces to attach the bottom of the wire to instead of the bolt as in the Makezine design. Then on the overhead arm I change that from the Makezine design basically at first due to not being able to find the aluminum round bar around home, but then I also figured that I would need more strength in the arm too. I like to over build when I make something, so stronger is always better in my opinion. At first just to try out the table we hooked up the previous Hand Held Hot Wire's power supply to the wire, which worked like a charm on the 2" Owens Corning Foam. Then the next day I received a Model Train control that was just like the Makezine one on their cover page picture, but it didn't really work to well with my setup. The Controller had a circuit protector that keep tripping in the middle of cutting the 2" foam, so we went back to the 6 volt AC power supply setup from before.
Like I said before; there is always room for improvement, and after using the table it was decided that the height of the arm needed to be raised. And I figured on doing an adjustable arm on it this coming weekend, that way I could make the wire almost whatever length I needed. This will help on doing free hand cuts and I can make sled to do different angle cuts, and I have some interesting ideas for the adjustable part that I need to hash out this week. I need to make the voltage adjustable with a dimmer switch or something, on the current setup it does good with 2" foam but on 1/2" foam it's way to hot. Which makes doing template cuts a lot harder, as the wire was trying to burn through the paper templates. And the peg board is not a super smooth surface, so at times the foam catches and burns in to far. Which if I really go into this project I'll make something for the table top with Melamine covered mdf plywood, and I'll imbed some t-track into the surface which will make the next improvement possible. Adjustable fence that is accurate, based off something that can be moved and locked down with the t-track. The small plywood fence in the picture is good for a quick cut, but it's not as accurate as I would like. And I need to make the table top big enough to cut down 4'x8' sheets of foam into 2' sections at least, this will help on making Modular Terrain Boards & for cutting down the foam to insulate between the studs on my motorcycle storage / small shop building.
As for the Modular Terrain, you can see one of the hill pieces that I sliced out on the Hot Wire Table in the above pictures. And right below is three preliminary hill pieces and one that was cut by the handheld Hot Wire I broke while making it and then finished off with a hand saw. To complete the cuts on the other pieces I need to build another handheld Hot Wire, which the friend and I brain stormed about that after the table was complete. And I need to figure out what I'm going to use to cover the foam so that it can be based and painted.
And as for the climbing holds, I had some ideas of using the 1/2" foam and the Hot Wire to make some basic shapes. And you can see two of those simple shapes in the table pictures above, then I glued the pieces together to form 1" thick and 1-1/2" thick pieces. Which once I make the mods to the current table, I'll be able to cut the foam pieces in two on a camber to form a real basic shape of the hold. And when I have the handheld Hot Wire worked out, I'll be able to finalize the their shapes and start to make molds of the holds. Then it's time for some trial and error testing to get the best mix for climbing holds that I want. Material wise I know that I'm not going with Bondo this time around, I had made some test climbing holds a few years back with Bondo. While they worked for how we had it setup at the time, it was not the best route and was difficult to get good results all the time due to the quick drying time of Bondo. I'm leaning towards using Smooth-On 300 series resins, with their color adders, maybe their resin fillers, and their mold making materials too. Their is also some climbing hold companies out there that are using Ceramic Coated Sand for filler and texture, so I'm also looking at finding some of that from a Pool Building Material Supplier.
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