EVA Foam (Ethylene-Vinyl Acetate foam) is a soft, flexible, and durable material made from a blend of ethylene and vinyl acetate. It’s known for being lightweight, shock-absorbent, and resistant to water, UV radiation, and chemicals. It’s key characteristics include being lightweight and flexible, water resistant, shock-absorbing, and easily cut, shaped, or heat-formed.

Common Uses

• Flooring: marine flooring, gym mats, play mats, and anti-fatigue mats
• Crafts and cosplay: for making costumes, armor, and props
• Footwear: midsoles of athletic shoes and sandals
• Packaging: protective padding for fragile items
• Sports gear: padding in helmets, guards, and yoga blocks

Today, we’re discussing EVA foam in marine flooring because I’ve been asked one too many times how to cut and shape it. We came up with a simple way to cut your created designs and logos in EVA foam as well as cut out the outer shape in order for pieces to fit in very specific places. This is very important when working on a flooring project for a customer.

EVA Foam Marine Flooring

EVA foam began gaining popularity for marine flooring in the early 2000s with companies like SeaDek pioneering and popularizing it, though it became much more mainstream around the 2010’s as manufacturers started marketing it specifically for boats and watercraft. Being a non-slip, cushioned, easy-to-install material that could stand up to the water and sun made it catch on quick. Today, EVA foam is a top choice for both recreational and professional marine use.

How to Cut

I’m guessing this is why you came here, so let’s get to it. We designed a (5) tool kit that allows anyone with a CNC router and marine flooring grade EVA foam sheets the capability to bring their designs to life. You’ll also need a razor blade or a CNC knife blade to cut out the outer shape of the pieces, but that blade will depend on the brand of your CNC router or knife cutter.

Step 1: Buy The Kit

You can view and purchase the 5-tool kit HERE.

Step 2: Choose the center line size

Our kit includes a 3/16″ and a 1/4″ 3 Flute router bit. These sizes seemed to be the most popular center line options. Other sizes are also available. Feel free to reach out if you’d like something additional. This tool needs to be ran in both climb and conventional directions in order to achieve best quality. We found that a spindle speed of 22,000 RPM and a feed rate of 100-150 IPM worked perfectly.

Step 3: Choose a Ball Burr size

The ball burr router bits are the tools that really bring the designs to life. Our kit includes 3 ball burr sizes: a 3/8″, 1/2″, and 3/4″. Again, more sizes are available but these three seemed to be the most popular. These tools also need to be used in both climb and conventional directions to achieve the best quality. However, these tools run at a much higher feed rate. We pushed our machine all the way up to 1,200 IPM before quality started to rapidly decline. In my opinion, the feed rates between 250 IPM to 600 IPM looked the best, so I would stick there.

Step 4: Knife Cutting

For those of you that have a knife cutting option on your CNC machine, this will be the easiest part. Simply load the correct oscillating blade and slice through it with ease. If you need blades for your Multicam, Zund, Kongsberg, Colex, Ecocam, AXYZ, Aristo, ESKO, or something else just let us know. We have high quality and affordable compatible blades HERE.

Conclusion

All in all, EVA foam for marine flooring can be cut and shaped many different ways. However, this is a simple and proven method, so hopefully this saved you a little time trying to figure out how to do it. Please note the information above applies to the industrial CNC router and knife cutter world. If you have a table top machine, the feeds and speeds may be completely different.

If anything here was explained too simply and you need any assistance or you have questions about the kit, please reach out. My contact information is below.

If you have any questions about which tools to use for any other project as well as how to program them for success, feel free to reach out anytime. Thanks for reading!