Reply To: [unofficial weekender] When is too much too much?

[blinky465 17028xp 2]

You know the pledge to not start anything new…. it doesn’t count if I’m *amending* (ok, adding to) an ongoing project does it? Because I cut some styrofoam but was disappointed with the way it painted up. From watching Youtube vids and a response on another thread, it sounds like tearing while drawing on cut styrofoam is just something we have to deal with.

Well…. not if you’ve a workshop full of electronics junk! So I made a “hot wire pen”

It’s little more than a couple of wires and a quick-release wire terminal hot-glued onto an old higlighter pen, into which I can shove some different grades of vape-coil wire. I adapted my hot wire cutter, so it now has a switch on the back and a socket to plug in my “hot pen” (or anything else I might come up with in the future). So I can toggle the controllable power between the hot wire or the “output socket”.

I found that the pen needs only about 8% power (I cut on the wire at about 60% from a 9v power source). At 15% the tip glows bright orange! Using different power settings gives me different width lines.

At 6% I can get a really quite thin wood grain effect. I actually prefer the slightly wider cuts, similar to the pencil lines, after painting – the wider cuts allow the quickshade ink to flow more easily and create a slightly more “cartoon-y” look (which I can’t pretend I *like* but it’s an aesthetic I’m happiest with, when I put my minis on it).

All were primed with Coat D’Arms paints (just because I had they lying around) – primed with grey “smelly primer” then base  painted with their “snakebite leather”, washed (across the grain) with Quickshade Strong Tone (water-based version) and drybrushed with Coat D’Arms “putrid brown”.

I really like the effect of the pencil on “virgin styrofoam” but a very good second-best is using a slightly hotter setting (about 12% power) with the “hot pen” on styrofoam that’s been cut by the hot wire. On the lowest setting, I can create a very tight/close grain effect, but it’s a bit “realistic” for my tastes 😉

So I blew my pledge.

But made a cool pen for styrofoam modelling. So – you know – you win some, you lose some…..