Lego 3-axis styrofoam cutter [video] | Hacker News Reader

Lego 3-axis styrofoam cutter [video]

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214 pointspavel_lishin22 comments

This is wonderfully creative!

However, I hate styrofoam with every cell in my body. I'm philosophically against anything that extends its useful lifetime by any amount of time. It's probably the worst thing for the environment, and it's essentially like toxic waste. When you just barely touch it, small flakes come off into the wind and they will never go away at least in our lifetime. I think we should have a world-wide ban on styrofoam in particular, even if prices go up.

there's the extruded stuff which is MUCH less terrible in the flaking department. I'd still rather not have anything to do with it if possible.

if you didn’t hate it enough, styrofoam is part of a hydrogen bomb…it absorbs gamma rays from the uranium nuke, heats up, and becomes a hot plasma. Then it causes fusion in the lithium deuteride, which is the fusion fuel.

We've built a lot of formwork for construction ( quite exotic projects ) with this method using industrial robots [1]. Some of the formwork stays in place after pouring the concrete acting as insulation. Than again, formwork is a means to an end, hence diamond wire cutting marble was a fun tangential [2]

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/330914101_SCALING_A... [2] https://vimeo.com/94076571

If you like this, check out this channel's other videos, this creator has a sort of orthogonal way of thinking about mechanisms that I deeply appreciate. It's always a treat when they upload.

My initial comment when opening the video was "Of course it's Akiyuki". I love the GBC modules on the channel.

As someone who has been deeply interested in this type of manufacturing technology for ages, my jaw is on the floor. Kudos to the person that made this. I'm so impressed.

hot knife cnc attachments are a lot of fun because of the low forces involved, and they can deal with a surprising amount of material variety; just make sure to deal with fumes.

This is fun.

Just a reminder: Burning foam releases toxic gases (inc. CO, benzene, toluene, and more). If you're going to be using heat to cut foam it needs to be in a well ventilated place. And, yes, I completely grasp that a hot wire isn't a large surface area but a lot of these off-gases will pool in areas without a moderate air current.

I was just coming to say, nice idea, so that you can put it in a hood and vent the fumes while it works. You could see the styrosmoke in that vid.

1) Affix the hot wire tool to some beams: 0:50

2) Draw the rest of the fucking owl: 1:20

This may be the first time i've seen moving the stock instead of the tool

It's not much different from a "bed slinger" 3D printer.

or a lathe

in a lathe, the tool moves, not the stock. it's not even close to the same thing. did you watch the video?

in a lathe, the stock is constantly rotating.

Good grief. The tool is what moves to make the cuts. If you seriously think this is the same thing, we’ll, boy, I don’t know.

Basic the creator has just create a lego version of a lathe?

how you can compare this to a lathe is beyond me

This is common in fancy CNC machines with rotational axes. It's much easier to rotate the stock than to rotate the whole tool around the stock.

What if you are printing a tool?

Then you don't do it that way.

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