[dorkbotsea-blabber] Phlatprinter - CNC for cutting foam sheets

[Wim Lewis]

On Aug 29, 2008, at 1:23 PM, Steve Greenfield wrote:
> A gentleman on the RC Groups and Wattflyer forums has made up  
> plans, partial kits, and full kits for a CNC made specifically to  
> cut out flat foam sheets.

Pretty interesting. Home CNC is slowly growing in popularity, but on  
the other hand each application seems to develop its own variant on  
the machinery. The most recent issue of MAKE had a brief article  
listing some of the 3d-printer projects out there and encouraging  
people to build a generic stage/gantry thing to put different kinds  
of "printing" heads on (depositing caprolactone or chocolate,  
sintering metal or sugar, much of the machine is the same).

A while ago I was looking at some large models someone was building  
up out of layers of relatively thick foam (I think this was at a  
dorkbot meeting a year or two ago?). It occurred to me that one could  
build a CNC X-Y hot-wire cutter that was able to control the angle of  
the cut, with a lot less trouble than building a full 5- or 6-DOF  
machine, and still be able to make pretty complicated 3d shapes by  
stacking the cut layers.

Out of curiosity, has anyone here thought about building a RepRap?