Custom Foam Cuts for Tool Storage

We use laser cut foam like this in all tool boxes in the Air Force for the same reason. Tool accountability is huge in aviation. We have laser cutters in most tool rooms that can custom cut these for all of our tools. Would be neat to see the Glowforge cut them!

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Yeah, those pilots get irate when they go inverted and a crescent wrench falls onto the canopy…
With your name, squadron and toolbox number inscribed on it!

It’s better to find it in the cockpit than taking it through the engine :scream:

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I have started making outlines for my tool chest. My drivers are all Wiha, so I went to their website, and downloaded the pictures they have, then imported to Inkscape, and traced the outlines. Exported them as DXF, then imported into Fusion 360 for cleanup.

I wish there was a more direct route for this, and I hope we can use the GF as a scanner, and save the results as a file.

I did send off an e-mail to Wiha this morning asking if they had silhouettes of their tools, and got a response that they do NOT have them.

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Most of my toolboxes have removable drawers, and my plan is to:

  1. take them out
  2. put them on the floor
  3. Put white paper in them for contrast
  4. arrange the tools (jigsaw puzzle time!)
  5. take pictures
  6. pull the pictures into illustrator and trace them
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All that effort is going to pay off every time you open the drawers!

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Foam inserts kept us from loosing a tool inside the cockpit or engine. I look at the rats nest of tools in every drawer of my rolling tool boxes. There isn’t that much foam on the east coast. At home I’ll just have to remember not to leave a hammer inside my Glowforge.

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ah how many less steps this would be with object detection :wink:

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admittedly I have a large drawer under the bench centered in the room that is 3 inches deep with general hand tools, and would hold only a fraction of its current load if I organized it.
I will have to be content to rake through it.

Your “not enough foam on the east coast” comment immediately brought an image of it to mind.

That’s that computer vision specialist’s work: stick a wrench in the Glowforge and it will know. Will be interesting to see how object detection might be incorporated.

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Oh Im hoping so! Theyre already doing it for the ‘cut the inverse on the back of a material’, so maybe they can just parlay that.

Its probably a bit late for something like this, but it would be pretty cool:

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Are you sure it’s safe? Isn’t the V in EVA vinyl?

‘Vinyl’ as in records is slang for polyvinyl chloride (PVC). EVA is short for ethylene-vinyl acetate.
Its actually the chloride © part of PVC that causes the issue, which EVA does not have. EVA has been found to be safe, and Ive been cutting it and heating it for quite a long time with no apparent adverse effects.

I will be cutting a TON of it when I get my glowforge! Its fun to watch because of how it reacts to heat. The more heat you apply (up to a certain point of course), the rounder the edges of your cuts get. So Im hoping that I can programatically create cuts with different fillets based on speed and power settings.

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Good to know. Thanks!!

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