A New Toy

I've done a lot of crafting for our Dungeons and Dragons games over the last three years or so. Much of this has been carving foam board (extruded polystyrene) into all manner of dungeon terrain, cave terrain, buildings, monuments, ruins, etc...

I have done this carving either free hand with a series of knives, or with those same knives and a set of metal rulers, T-squares etc...

On the advice/recommendation of Jeremy from Black Magic Craft on YouTube, I broke down and bought a Proxxon Thermocut hot wire table. The Amazon Prime fairies delivered it yesterday (one day shipping to have it for some of the weekend), and I got to play around with it a little bit last night.

Proxxon Thermocut Hot Wire Table

Oh my gosh. Why did I wait so long to get this!?!?

The wire heats pretty much instantly after hitting the ON switch, and can cut 2 inch thick foam sheets with ease. There is an adjustable fence that can be used on two sides, and can be adjusted for any angle 0 degrees to 90 degrees. It's like a mini table saw for foam.

I have yet to spend much time doing anything with it other than the briefest of test drives, but in a matter of maybe 5 minutes last night I was able to rip several 2 inch tall strips of half-inch foam using the fence, and then freehand those strips into a number of pieces that will become ruined walls.

Ruined wall pieces - mere minutes to make!

Amazingly quick. And easy. And uniform.

Pieces would be assembled like this...

Good stuff. More to come...