MKS Gen L V 2.1 Board for CNC Foam Cutting

This guide walks you through exactly how to set up the GRBL HotWire system I’ve developed since 2020. It’s designed for hobbyists, not engineers, and it works with several affordable controller boards. Whether you’re building your first cutter or upgrading an old one, follow the steps below and you’ll be cutting accurate wing cores and…

The hot wire bow is my preferred way to tension the wire for CNC foam cutting. The picture below shows my bow which I use on my CNC foam cutter. Advantages of using a bow The bow doesn’t exert tension between the left and right carriages but the spring method does. When foam cutting wings…

The Problem: running out of machine travel If you’ve ever tried cutting a high-sweep design like a flying wing, you’ve likely hit a frustrating wall: running out of horizontal travel on your CNC foam cutter. I use a clever alignment trick in DevWing Foam (and previously Profili 2 Pro). By aligning the leading or trailing…

Using 3d printers has become increasingly popular for making all types of CNC machines. The term you see quite a lot is MPCNC(Mostly Printed CNC). Many guys have sent pictures to me showing how they have made an MPCNC for foam cutting. I’ll include a design you can 3d print for free, courtesy of Mario…

What is the Kerf? Kerf is defined as the width of material that is removed by a cutting process. So in our case it’s the amount of foam melted by the hot wire. To get accurate parts we need to know how much foam is melted away by the hot wire. So before we can ascertain…