Low budget tool making.

[aerohead]

tooling can also be made with lath and plaster.The original Corvette tooling was done this way.
The 'plug' can be plaster as well as the female mold.Slit-molds for complex forms.
Georgia-Pacific makes a full line of industrial tooling plasters.
There's no 'stink'.No hazardous vapors.
Tooling epoxy, "plastic-faced" plaster molds can be used for limited production runs.
Even drywall compound can be used for one-off studies.After priming, painting,color-sanding,and polishing with acrylic lacquer and polyvinyl alcohol with three coats of carnauba wax,a perfect part or mold can be pulled.
Ferro-cement can also be used for tooling,even metal forming,but get help lifting as this is a 'heavy' proposition.
Beyond small batch production you'd want to graduate to Kirksite alloy tools.

[freebeard]

My parents cut foam on a homemade 'jigsaw'. It's long gone, but I still have the Lionel transformer from it. As I recall about 70% throttle was used.

Let's not forget Ed Roth. He made a male mold and then chipped it out from the inside of the new body.

[u.steinlechner]

But if there are more work to do, I would buy a foam plotter.

CNC Foamplotter zum Schneiden von Styropor und Styrodur

[freebeard]

It might do better for most people's needs on this forum if it was US$85.10 instead of 1.580,00 €.

I tried really hard to get what the cutter tool is without looking at the English page and failed. Then I looked at the English page and all it says is:

Z-AXIS (3)
(3)Length of the cutting wire

so I don't feel so bad.

The part of the process I'd be concerned about is that the stacked sections of foam leave as much as √2x the thickness of the section undefined. The uncertainty is less in flat areas and greatest at creased edges. Would you stack thinner sheets in areas that need definition, or embed a wire along the crown of the crease? A localized cut and fill, where you shave material, mix it in a [differently colored] matrix and refill it into the low spots would give you an average surface. ...and create less dust. A correctly averaged surface would show twice as many edges at the original stack.