Milling soft cushioning foam?

[corpseguy]

i've seen a few of you guys cnc milling/routing poly foams and such..

i'm curious. do you think you could also cnc soft cushing foam? the spongy type?

thoughts?


joe

[vger]

I have hot wire cut soft foam with some success. Really smelly and not a smooth operation. A band saw does a much smoother job. How large are the pieces you intend to cut? Do you need 3 axis or just 2?

Steve

[corpseguy]

more so for cutting out 3d shapes like a regular cnc router..

[neilw20]

Dry ice or liquid nitrogen (take a vacuum flask to your supplier. Good fun. Be careful of skin contact though.)
Feeze it. Now you can machine a solid.

[vger]

Exactly what I was going to suggest. You will have to freeze it to keep it from catching and wrapping if you plan to use a router. I understand that there has been some success on soft material using a burr type tool in a very high speed (50K rpm) spindle.

Best of luck
Steve

[bones]

Hi,
I'm no expert on this but I know someone that has done this.
He told me the trick is to use a sharp multi flute cutter.
The one he showed me was a 10mm 10 flute cutter.

The numerous flutes doesn't give the foam time to compress before it is hit with the next one.

Cheers
Rod

[Making chips]

Soak it in water, then stick it in your freezer. It will be like machining a block of ice. It will keep the cutter cool as well. Hopefully you are done before it melts!!

[Splint]

If you freeze it make sure you take measuremets of the block of foam before and after freezing it to see what happens in regard to thermal contraction, you may need to scale your cad dimensions depending on the acuracy required.

Splint