hey everybody adam savage here in my cave
with a tool tip today's tool tip is another product from the lovely folks at proxon
p-r-o-x-x-o-n if you remember i did a tool tip about their rotary cutter rotary tool which i love
so much i slapped a magnet on it and it lives here under my workbench full time yeah um
it made it up to the big leagues proxon makes a whole bunch of small shop tools uh that are meant
for small fabrication and this wire cutter this is a tool that i have rarely had as part
of my process but every time i've needed it and used it it's blown my mind with what it can do
uh so a couple of years ago i pulled the trigger on purchasing this one
and i have barely run it through its paces but i've used it enough recently to like be very
impressed i i love this thing it is it is awesome so to be clear a wire cutter is simply a uh a thin
piece of nichrome wire and nichrome wire is a wire of a particular tensile strength and a
alloy that allows it to take electricity and get hot without it changing its properties a lot
of things when they get hot they expand i think nichrome expands a little less i'm not actually
sure i haven't looked it up but um the wire gets hot and it cuts through things that are thermally
cuttable specifically foam so this is foamulon this is uh dow's pink home insulating foam
you can get this in most big hardware stores around the country i used it to make my
chewbacca boots i used a bunch of this stuff to make the safe that's now hanging over a tested
and uh i actually used this wire cutter a whole bunch on the chewbacca
boot thing and that made me realize i should do a tool tip about this thing
i'm trying to think if there's stuff i should cover here or if i should just cut to an overhead
shot look the main thing i would like to to point out about a wire cutter is that you could
it is a very low kerf low impact zero dust mode of cutting with foam
and there are ways in which it's arguable that you could do like almost every assignment in
the first year of an industrial design class using just phone uh it's a super versatile material and
this kind of makes it sting in a way that a few other things could so it's something to consider
if you have a small shop you can also build your own wire cutters you can buy nichrome wire in
rolls like this you can buy a power supply for not that much adjustable power supply
so you can adjust the amount of electricity going through that wire there are plenty of
youtube videos describing how to make your own wire cutter both handheld and benchtop that is
not what this video is about we're just going to show you some of the cool things that it does
so just to walk you through the basic operation it has a form factor similar to a scroll saw doesn't
it yes it does i'm gonna answer my own rhetorical question uh in that we've got this level of
depth here now the way it works is i've got a spool of what looks like 26 gauge wire up here
and that spool has a tightening knob and that wire goes through a hole here and i can tighten the
wire in the hole using this knob so when i tighten the wire in that hole and i put a little bit of
downward pressure on this upper arm and tighten the spool i end up with this this it doesn't i
want it to go it doesn't but i end up with a wire under just a little bit of tension which is ideal
um yeah there we go so wires under a little bit of tension uh you have a power switch you turn
the power switch on you see the light goes on um and there is a dial with numbers on it
and a handy a handy little chart here which tells you if you're working with something
that's 20 to 50 millimeters in depth you want to go to a level 4 or if you have a thing that is
50 to 100 millimeters in depth so right here i can say this is 45 millimeters in depth so
i'm gonna say probably level four is what i want it's just under 50. and here is what happens
i'm just like i'm just dying to just i want to i'm going to draw something quickly here
there we go i have drawn this shape i'm gonna
change the camera angle so you watch the whole thing happen
okay we're going to start here
i love this thing watch this
oh you might want to wear a respirator while you're doing this if you're doing
it a whole bunch the foam like you can definitely smell it
i'm just roughly following the line i am not trying to be too
slavishly perfect here and it's definitely something you get a feel for
if you're going to purchase one of these and use it in a project i'd recommend
buying a bunch of extra foam so that you had a chance to really practice that in fact almost
exclusively whenever i'm in bringing in a new process i include plenty of time to actually
experiment with and try out some of the things i'm thinking about doing and this is no different um
this is actually almost the same kind of pattern i cut out of my scroll saw when i first bought it
and we're out okay so what did we end up with we ended up with
the world's simplest the world's simplest jigsaw cutter the world singles sorry the world's
simplest jigsaw puzzle is what i meant to say and there you go that is
yeah i uh that kind of thing thrills me thrills me all right let's look at some of the other things
this can do because it comes with a square and you can mount this square in and it's got this
wonderful thing so if you want what you wanted to do was to cut out let's say some small strips
of material you put the square here and how do i adjust that i guess uh so yeah look at this
like a table saw you can actually just cut right through it's kind of an optimal
speed you can feel the material moving underneath and look at that perfect cuts
perfect perfect perfect cuts um then you want to make a square you certainly can
oh that's me cutting a little fast you heard that
that's me cutting too fast i'm gonna do a second cut and going a little slower
that's it
oh again with the too fast business
yeah so you can see here how you could make yourself beams and make a model train set if
you wanted hell spells you could uh yeah you could do uh oh so i mean you can see with thin material
you have tremendous control um you can also do things you can cut yeah
if you want to turn it up a bit you can do stuff like um we've done stuff like this
that's a nice little ice cliff pattern there yep yeah right right um you can also make
metal templates and put them on pieces and use this to cut them out i'll demonstrate
there we go i'm just gonna bring this over
i'm just letting it graze along the edge of the washer
and oh it's not as beautiful as i was hoping it's not good looking at all
why isn't that good looking pretty good looking was it that i went to ah okay let's try
this
okay let me go soften that edge we're learning how to do this together
come in a little slow
oh i see it's because i was touching the edge of the metal and pulling on it i was actually
stretching the i was stretching the cable out i was stretching the wire out of vertical
that's why i ended up okay well that's a actually a pretty straightforward reason and this is better
looking but you can still see i've got some issues uh you can set things up i mean dude
what i mean yeah for craft work who's craft i don't want to say craft
for desktop type work with something like this this is an unbelievable tool it provides
uh some tremendous precision and a very low impact like i said zero dust uh turn it off when you're
not using it certainly uh there's a fuse and i blew it in here um it's a really nice wire cutter
i really really dig it i've had a couple here i've had a couple of handhelds they have tended to wear
out um this one with its endless wire and i've got some other wire in stock uh i'm here to recommend
the proxxon thermal cut is what they call it and it is their hot wire foam cutter
is that everything i think that might be everything thank you guys for joining me
i'll see you next time