Cutting foam

[Buck-Beaver]

Forgot to mention that if you are doing a lot of cutting of foam it will wear down the blade of whatever you are using to cut VERY quickly. To help prevent this lubricate the blade you are using with a tiny bit of oil. I use 3-in-1 oil but even vegtable oil will work. It will help to keep the blade sharp.

 

[BorkBork]

For cutting out the patterns in foam i use razors. But they dull really easily. I have been looking into buying one of those machines used to cut roast or turkey. David P uses one, and it seems to work really fine.

 

[Buck-Beaver]

Again, using a little oil as lubrication on your razor blade with make it last at least three times as long. The electric turkey knives are good, but I thought used mostly for carving foam.

 

[BorkBork]

Again, using a little oil as lubrication on your razor blade with make it last at least three times as long. The electric turkey knives are good, but I thought used mostly for carving foam.

What kind of oil? Cookingoil?

David cuts a sheet of foam in his video with a turkeyknife.

 

[biblebetty]

does that mean you use a turkeyknife to shape a block of foam too. I have a knife and it is very hard to control. Does should I cut slowly?

 

[Buck-Beaver]

What kind of oil? Cookingoil?

David cuts a sheet of foam in his video with a turkeyknife.

I usually use 3-in-1 oil, which is a sort of general purpose oil sold in hardware stores in North America. I'm not sure what the equivlent would be in Europe (do they have 3-in-1 oil there?).

Regular vegtable oil (the cooking kind) seems to work equally well though.

Interesting to hear about David using the turkey knife to cut sheets. I hadn't heard of that before, but whatever works works I guess!

 

[ToastCrumbs]

For the record the Muppet workshop really only uses two methods for cutting straight and perfect lines when patterning out a puppet. Razor blades are the most used choice by the shop, and second would be the band saw.
No matter which way you go, the blades go dull very quickly. Sometimes when carving a head maybe you get only four or five good cuts, after that the blades tends to pull on the foam and doesn't glide as well. This doesn't mean the blades aren't plenty sharp for other things. Using oil for lubrication sounds like a really smart idea, although I don't think I ever witnessed one person in the shop do it, for the simple reason that we'd just go and get another new box. We were very lucky and also spoiled that we always had endless amounts of puppet building materials. Oh, how I miss it soooooo!!! You can bet that I'm oiling razor blades like crazy now. If I remember correctly we averaged about a dollar per razor blade and probably used between 30 to 60 on a puppet head sometimes. The simplest things drive up the price of construction on a puppet.

 

[Buck-Beaver]

Ah...there's nothing better than a nice, new, sharp razor blade...

uh...that came out much more disturbingly than I had intended...

 

[zoetrope]

Just the info I was looking for

Hey, I was just about to post a question on this very subject and then found this thread. Good info here. What I found is that cutting foam with a scissors doesn't work because it pinches the foam before cutting it and you end up with a concave instead of a flat surface where you just cut. Everytime I tried to cut the edges off the concave plane, I'd just create two more smaller concave surfaces. Maybe the scissors wasn't sharp enough.

Anyway, I'll have to try the sharp blade next time. Thanks for the info.

 

[ScrapsFlippy]

When you guys say "electric carving knife" are you talking about the battery powered, heated metal filament that melts its way through foam, or what my father-in-law calls the "household chainsaw," a double bladed knife you would use to carve up meat?

-Scraps