This documents failure. (Que dirty trombone.) But, like in science, when crafting a failure is not a failure if you have learned from the process!
I’ve learned that until I acquire a hot wire scroll table, I am going to be focusing on simple designs and natural caverns, landscape and other terrain. I had planned to make a tower but with only a hot knife I am going to hold off on that.
Drilled a hole into every half-inch along a wooden ruler to use as a compass to cut circles. A toothpick can serve as the fulcrum and the hot knife blade through a hole can be used to cut semi-circles in varying thicknesses. In theory.
You can see that the semi-circle on the “top side” where I had the knife inserted looks fairly clean. A couple of flaws but you’d think “Not a bad first result for a first try.” In the pic below you can see that the underside looks much worse.
In starting the cut, I was on a hard desk top and soon learned the hot knife tip is not smooth, it caught on the surface of the desk and so did not cut cleanly. Holding the foam up and cutting it in the air meant I varied the speed and angle a bit in trying to hold foam aloft and cut and guide with the other hand. This did not work out well. I definitely will need to get a scroll table or at least a sled at some point to continue with architecture.
Above you can really see how the far edge, the top of the cut, looks much cleaner than the bottom cut due to extreme variance in the angle of the blade.
So here’s to learning more! I will be focusing on doing some natural rock sculpting for the moment while I think about how to better cut the foam for structural designs.
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