hey this is kate with tested and i'm here today to talk to you about a really cool tool this is a hot
wire foam carving knife and this one is made by foam factory as you can see the cool thing about
a hot wire foam carving knife is as it says in its name you can do a lot of different foam carving
with it it's essentially a wire that gets heated up and it slides right through foam like butter
i tend to use it with insulation foam it comes in different colors and different sizes you know
you might say pink foam blue foam whatever this one is a little thicker than this one and what's
cool about it is that you can get creative and glue some pieces together and make some
a bit thicker of three-dimensional shapes that you can carve through so let's see what it comes with
so this by far is my most used tool that comes in the kit the kits tend to come with a few different
items depending but this one is almost always there this is the sculpting tool and as you can
see you have two arms that adjust out and a wire goes in between them now what's neat is depending
on how thick of a piece you're doing how big of dishes you want to carve you can choose how
big and how wide the arms spread apart then you tension the wire in between the two
here you can see it comes with a bag of extra wires because eventually you will burn through
some of these or one might break so you have these backups here and when you come this is
not threaded yet at all you get to choose your size it has a handy dandy tensioner tool here
and what it does is it clips onto the base so you look for your two screws and you've got your two
holes here and you want to line those up it fits in the notches there like that snap it into place
and now it keeps your arms in the position that you want it so it's totally open you can see
this is still a little loose i actually like to keep it that way to give a little give if
it's too tight you do run the risk of wanting it to snap but it's totally up to you tighten
it loosen it totally to your preferences so that is the sculpting tool and i really like that one
this one is actually an engraver tool and you can see it's a bit thicker this one is a short one i
think that they also make a longer one this one's really good for doing surface detail work you know
basically engraving a little bit of surface carving if you're going to make maybe a special
scroll pattern just on the top if you're going to write something like on a sign there's a lot
of really good control that you have with this one as well because this one's a shorter one
it's got this good base so i find that it's really easy to make some pretty detailed
intricate markings with this and lastly this is the plain old hotknife tool they say you can
plunge slice and dice with this so basically it is a longer thinner needle uh you know it's going to
be similar to your engraving tool and that you can sort of do some surface work if you like another
interesting thing you can do with it is to do some scroll work so say i wanted to put in you know a
curly cue into this as if you were using a scroll saw you can go all the way through it that's the
benefit of it being so long and really slowly go through there and add your pattern into it
this one has a lot of versatility something to be careful for is that if you put too much pressure
it might want to bend and you could get sort of a warped end and in the instructions even they say
for best results keep it straight if you notice it's starting to bend
obviously unplug it wait for it to get cool and try to bend it back into a straight shape
but yeah this one has a lot of versatility you can end up doing a lot of things with it i have found
if i need to just make a hole straight through a piece of foam and i don't want to risk
you know using a drill bit and it being a little too strong and tearing things up this is a nice
way to slowly go through it and then you can slowly board that hole wider if you need to
or even if i've used a band saw and cut part of it i need to match up two different cuts
together this is just great to get in there and do a little more detail work
lastly this kit comes with um styro goo this is basically a specialty glue that is meant
specifically for styrofoam since this kit is meant to be used with
various kinds of styrofoam uh they recommend using this if you have accidentally broken a piece off
if you want to stack some pieces of foam together anything like that this is their proprietary brand
of glue i tend to lean towards a spray adhesive or even hot glue um but it's nice to know that
if you want to stick within the same brand and family that that is there for you um all
three of these tools basically plug into the same power uh outlet here and you can see
they all come with the same bit on the end it's basically to me reminds me of like a speaker jack
plug that in and heats up it should heat up i want to say within 30 seconds maybe a minute
and then uh you're good to use it as long as it's plugged in after you unplug it obviously give it
a little time let it cool down a bit all right let's see some of the examples of what you can do
with these tools now keep in mind some of this foam can be quite toxic especially
when you heat it up so out of abundance of caution i'm going to be wearing a respirator
try to do it in a well-ventilated space yadda yadda be careful just use your best judgment
now right here i'm going to be stacking a few of these thinner foam
slices together this will allow me to carve something that's a bit larger but
um using this thin material now something to keep in mind when you are working with
foam and as i am here hot glue if the glue is too hot it will melt right through
the foam and you won't be able to meet them up in time before it sort of goes through and creates
a giant cavern so you want to make sure that you're using a hot glue gun on its lower setting
that way it doesn't melt right through create a giant cavern and you know make a huge puddle
of the glue and then you can't even join the pieces together so i also like to make sure that
i'm using the glue sparingly you don't want to have a huge chunk that you have to carve through
if your hot knife should hit it so i do thin layers just enough to make them stick together
put it down the benefit of using a low setting is that the glue cools and dries quickly so here we
have our nice little mountain set and it's good to go now as an example since i've made this one
a nice stack and it's got an angle naturally made into it i will just make this sort of look like a
mountain i'm going to put on my respirator and get to carving with my sculpting tool
so again you want to go slow so that you don't aren't putting too much tension
on your wire there you go now i like to work in stages so they're not doing too deep at once
so obviously that did not meet in the center there i'm going to do another
pass
yeah all right so you can see here it's getting a lot smoother and nicer meeting up with it
i'll go down to the next layer
you end up just having to be real patient with it like i said you don't want to rush
it you don't want too much tension just let it slide through the material on its own
you may notice a bit of smoke coming off of your wire here it's burning off any residue
that's been left behind so you can see sometimes the foam will leave a little bit of goo on there
it's burning that off and that's precisely what you probably don't want to be breathing
uh if if you find that your wire is not getting hot enough or it feels like it's stretching too
much it might be a good idea to take a wet rag or something like that and try and clean off the wire
as the residue builds up but be careful not to burn yourself the cool thing about using
hot glue is that when your hot wire hits it you might feel a little resistance at first but then
hey guess what it just melts and the wire goes right through it again all right this is good
enough for the example i want to give you can see how nicely it goes through and gives some natural
undulations and shapes now if i wanted a particularly jagged mountain if i wanted the
lines going in a different direction there's always room to go in and be more detailed
and also this can be used just as a starting point you can then go through with your sure form
with sand paper with sculpting tools anything you want but that was a very satisfying process gave
us a really good start on what i think could be a pretty cool landscape piece
now that was a sculpting tool i will give you a little demo on the hot knife tool
and see what that can do with maybe a little scroll work oh this one's even more satisfying
oh my god
all right so as you can see you can do some fun scroll work there with the
hot knife function you can cut out chunks as opposed to using a band saw
you can put holes right through the middle of it it's really versatile
i like that you can do a lot with it now we're going to do the last tool which is the enclaver
all right and as you can see there i had some very satisfying work with the uh engraving tool
i wrote my name in cursive if anybody remembers what cursive is um show an example of sort of
some filigree work that you can do simple dots if you needed it for a texture if you want to create
little craters whatever you need uh very quick very simple very satisfying so that's i think
a good example of all of the different things you can do with this foam factory hot wire knife
foam carving kit hopefully you guys found that useful if you have one yourself if there's
projects you've used it for or if you're going to go out and try one now make sure to hit us up show
us what you've done i'd love to see it otherwise hope this has been helpful i'm kate take it easy