RA Cores is proud of their fully computerized foam cutting capability. The computer controlling

    image of 68HC11 driver board

Linux box downloading to driver board

the cutter is from the robotics courses at MIT and it is downloaded from a AMD 5x86-133 running Linux.

This custom designed and built cutter is capable of cutting one piece panels up to 56" wide for you glider types, 27" chords for you giant scale types and up to 10" thick foam. This new cutter is completely template free and cuts with an accuracy of greater than .001" (2016 steps per inch on the X axis and 5600 steps per inch on the Y axis). Gone are the templates that took so long to create and align and gone is the laborious setup/alignment time for one of a kind custom orders. Multiple taper glider wings will have aligned cores beds allowing for one piece sheeting, if desired. Pattern and power wings with true incidence

Image of cutter mechanism
Animated GIF of cutting cores

See our cutter in action as a .avi (373kb), .mov (905kb), or multipart .gif (1208kb) file

For custom wing designers and manufacturers, you need to provide datapoints for the desired airfoil. If you have a Macintosh computer this program will allow you to generate SoarTech style coordinates that we can use. Our native format is floating point X/Y values with the leading edge at 0, normalized to 1.0 (pretty much the stock coordinates provided in such publications as SoarTech). We can allow for sheeting of various thicknesses. We offer reasonable rates on cutting custom wings upon request. Quantity one includes setup. Additional sets of the same wing at reduced cost. We can cut cores for a club building project with rapid turnaround. We cut 1lb. virgin white expanded bead foam or 1.5lb. extruded gray. We can provide bare cores or all the wood to complete the wing.
RA Cores
P.O. Box 863
Southbridge, MA 01550

Internet: info@racores.com
or visit our home page
Voice or Fax: (508) 765-9998