After looking at one of them, I decided that there wasn’t any way in the world that I was going to cut them on the bandsaw. There’s enough sawdust in the shop as it is, without adding styrofoam dust to it.
I’d remembered seeing a hot wire foam cutter on the MAKE: blog so I went looking for how to make my own hot wire cutter. The MAKE: blog pointed to flywoodkb’s hot wire foam cutter on instructables so I started with that as my basis.
Here’s what I came up with. Visit my hot wire foam cutter set on Flickr for more pictures.
Instead of the CD case project box, I just used a three wide plastic outlet box from HD to hold the dimmer and transformer. I cut the tabs off the sides since they were just in the way. Since I had some 1-by material around, I used that to make a small bow for holding the cutting wire. Twine around the top is used to tension the wire and can be adjusted as the wire heats and lengthens.
Since I was tasked with cutting foam balls in half, I made up a jig to help hold them in place and guide the wire at the right height. It’s nothing more than two pieces of 1-by two inches in height placed at a small angle on a board. This allowed me to hold the ball in place with one hand and while the other hand held the bow so the wire would ride the 1-by material and cut a nice clean line.
]]>Very neat idea. He even made up little one way stops so he could keep the film in tension.
(via Kottke)
]]>Pretty funny stuff.
Thanks BoingBoing for the pointer.
]]>]]>Bug in Windows-operated toilet system
Wendy M. Grossman
Sat, 21 Feb 2004 11:01:12 +0000
I was at a press conference on Thursday with PalmSource at One Aldwych, which is one of those hyper-modern London hotels. One of its features is a airplane-style vacuum-operated toilet system. One of the Palm execs told me that while they were staying at the hotel this system failed, and any time they wanted to use the bathroom or take a shower they had to call the reception desk and get escorted to the corporate headquarters in the building next door to use the facilities there. For a couple of days.
It transpires that the entire plumbing system is run by a Windows-based computer system and whatever went wrong with it was so obscure that they had to get a technician from the company that supplied it on a plane down from Scotland to fix it and reboot.
The Blue Screen of Sewage?
[There’s a “Sucker” Borne Every Evacuation! PGN]