Cut settings: material, feedrate & pre-heat

The Cut settings panel in cncfoam.com: pick a foam material to auto-suggest feedrate and pre-heat, understand the material info card, and tune speed for clean cuts.

The Cut settings panel (left side) controls the cutting physics that go into your G-code and the cut-time estimate.

Material

Pick the foam you are cutting (EPS, XPS, EPP, PE, EVA, WAX, Other). Choosing one does two things: it auto-suggests a sensible feedrate and pre-heat, and it opens a floating material info card with the wire temperature range, cut speed, melt/burn temperatures, best uses, what to watch for, and a health/safety note for that foam. Re-selecting the same material reopens the card.

Feedrate (mm/s)

How fast the wire moves through foam. This is the single biggest lever on cut quality (see Wire, temperature & feedrate). Changing it recalculates the total cut time and rewinds the animation. Typical EPS values are roughly 10–60 mm/s depending on density and wire heat. The feedrate is written into every cutting move in the G-code.

The feedrate you set is applied to the animation and G-code at load time — so the preview plays at the speed your machine will actually run, not whatever was baked into a source file.

Pre-heat (ms)

A pause at the start of each cut so the wire reaches working temperature before motion begins. It is emitted as a G4 dwell after the hot-wire-on (M8) command in the G-code. Set it to 0 for no dwell, or a few hundred milliseconds to a second for a clean entry. Without enough pre-heat the wire drags at the start of a cut and can mark the entry.

Cut-time estimate

cncfoam.com estimates total cut time from the contour length and feedrate, with a small allowance for corner overhead. It is shown in the timeline and saved with published shapes so others know roughly how long a part takes.

Rotation rate (3/5-axis)

On rotation machines an extra Rot. rate (°/s) field appears, controlling how fast the foam spins between indexed cuts in the animation. It is a visual/animation setting and does not change the G-code.