Rigid Tool Boxes & Cutting Foam

[JohnnyEgo]

Kaizen foam is the name of a laminated foam product from FastCap, which is marketed quite heavily to wood workers and mechanics. It is supposed to be very easy to cut, and the laminated layers are supposed to be easy to peel to a particular depth. It's also cheap. I am generally not a fan of cutting foam, because I have never been very good at it. But the Kaizen foam got a lot of hype, and it was cheap. I figured I'd give it a shot with some of my AR tools that had been just freely floating around an old Black & Decker plastic tool box for the last decade or so.

I switched boxes to the Rigid nesting box from Home Depot (more on that later). Then I gave a go at foam cutting with all the Kaizen specialty products, including the thin razor and the pattern marker. I found the foam to not peel very easily or controllably, the knife worked great for the first few cuts but dulled quickly, and the pattern marker dried up quick. Peel to depth did not work very well, and once the knife dulled, it was useless. Things look fair to ok with the tools in place, but you can see how badly cut and fitted they are with the tools out.



I had much better luck when I reverted to my old approach of a soldering iron with a piece of #12 copper wire as a cutter. It's how I did my long punches and trigger guard tool:



I think the best thing Kaizen foam has going for it is that it is cheap. Both in price and quality of foam. In my sample size of 1, I found the associated tools and markers to be great for the very limited amount of time they worked. Once I use up the Kaizen foam, I will probably just go back to more conventional foam I can get at my local rubber supplier should I ever find myself with the overwhelming desire to cut foam again.

[JohnnyEgo]

The Rigid boxes, on the other hand, are fricking awesome. They are cheap, they stack, and they lock into place. I now use them for a bunch of stuff.



Obviously, the AR tools, but also my cleaning and maintenance travel box.



The crate is great for guns and last minute items:



Everything stacks so nicely under my bench:


They make a bunch of different sizes and features, all of which interlock with one another:


The wheeled version is great for carting a bunch of stuff down range.

[JohnnyEgo]

The midsize box is great for holding random bench gear.



As an added bonus, they all clear my truck bed cover:



Home Depot periodically sells the three box set (Wheeled base, middle, and upper) for $100. The smaller boxes and the crate run $29 a pop. They are not particularly square, and I'd call them 'water resistant' instead of water proof, but I think this system is absolutely awesome for the price.

[TheGrey]

Those Rigid boxes look like the perfect thing to corral all sorts of stuff, be they garage items or various vehicle stuff! Thanks for posting pics that show how they all come together.

As far as the foam goes, have you given any thought to using tailor's chalk for outlining the areas you want to cut? I wonder if that would work better than a marker that would fade before you were halfway through the cut.

I don't think I've ever used Kaizen foam, so this is good info to know. The only foam I've cut has been with an Exacto blade, with several replacement blades to switch out when they dull.

[Wulf202]

Have you tried am oscillating cutter on the foam?

[Erni]

Look up nichrome wire foam cutters. Otherwise a long thin sharp utility knife blade and patience.

[JohnnyEgo]

The pattern marker works surprisingly well and doesn't fade on the foam. That's actually a problem if you cut inside the line. I ended up going back over the visible cut lines with a Sharpie. Tailor's chalk sounds like a good thing to try. The biggest problem with the pattern marker was that it dried out within 20 minutes.

About a decade and some change ago, everyone was into cutting foam, and I was among them. I used serrated knives, electric carving knives, and jigsaw blades. They all worked to varying degrees. I even have a Nichrome cutter, which worked great for through work, though that was not what I was trying to do here. I did run a Bosch T308B jigsaw blade through it, which worked well on single layer foam in the past. In the Kaizen foam, it ended up snagging and tearing the laminated layers too much for my tastes. Another jigsaw blade may work better.

The harsh but consistent truth for me with foam appears to be that my ambitions and expectations consistently exceed my actual abilities.

[Irving]

Would it be realistic to separate the layers at the depth you want, through cut the top layer, then just place the top layer back on the base?

[JohnnyEgo]

They have a pretty low melt temperature, so it is relatively easy to laminate two pieces with a heat gun. Unfortunately, they don't separate cleanly, and I think using a heat knife blade to separate them would probably melt the layers. I can experiment on a small piece, though, the next time I am in town.