It dawned on me as I came up with the idea for this post that I don’t post a lot about some of the tools I find and use.

Recently I was contemplating a wire foam cutter and I saw on on our local equivalent of ebay for $30NZ. A lot of the stuff on that site is just listed by people who order from Aliexpress when you buy the item (the delivery times are all from China), so I decided to search Aliexpress. Sure enough there was the PVC foam cutter with the same photos, for the princely sum of $1.95US (or about $3NZ) plus postage.

About 2 weeks later it arrived and I assembled it in under 1 hour. It is very basic compared to some of the more expensive machines out there but it does it job and cuts the foam. It is battery powered which is a downside for me, but I think I can hook it up to a multi voltage adapter I have (and hopefully don’t fry the wire in the process).

I tried 10 and 30mm foam and it cut through pretty well. The wire tensioner is pretty basic and I didn’t want to snap the wire, so it was too loose with my experiments, which causes a wave effect on the cuts. I also experimented with clamping a piece of wood onto the base to act as a guide so I can cut straight lines, and I’d like to see if I can also find ideas for jigs to cut curves.

So what can it be used for in the 6mm world? I plan to make basic building shapes out of XPS foam and then add details to them from putty, plasticard and green stuff. I think the XPS foam is not durable enough by itself for 6mm “scale” pieces, without some sort of coating or card/plastic over the top. But one of the advantages of XPS is that details can be carved into it, so I want to see how to create some pieces which has the benefits of foam, but is still durable.

Where it should be useful is making larger buildings such as industrial ones like warehouses, desert buildings, scifi skyscrapers, castles, or buildings to fit into awkward spaces like the side of a hill or an odd shaped corner house.

A lot of the commercially available wargames buildings are box shaped which creates a grid effect for groups of buildings, but in reality that doesn’t not seem to always be the case. That’s one of the reasons I like Total Battle Miniatures as their towns quite often have groups of buildings and streets running off at different angles, which looks more organic.