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| A paper trimmer for A*! Slice, slice! | Jun 29, 2012 7:58 AM PDT | url |
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Added 2 new A* pages:I got a paper trimmer! Whee! Since I'm doing two pages a lot of days, it was getting to be kind of a drain to have to cut my A*-sized pieces of paper out each day to work on, so I got one of them big swinging guillotine blade paper cutter things like the teacher got to use in grade school, you know like a machete hinged to a cutting board. Sweeeeet. I hadn't got one originally because a cursory look showed them to be surprisingly expensive, like in the several hundreds of dollars for some reason. But fortunately I just found the Dahle Vantage Paper Trimmer, which is not super-expensive, had really good user reviews, and comes in an 18" size that is just the width of the paper I need to cut for A*! Here it is looking dangerous, even after cutting out nine pages in a flash:
(Mind you, it's only on the ancient brown shag carpet for show--you're supposed to have it on a flat, level surface when cutting with it, etc.)
It was a little puzzling to get the blade open at first--turns out it has a simple locking mechanism to hold it in place so you don't accidentally cut off body parts when carting it around: just pull it sideways a half inch or so, then raise. It says this on the back of the instructional sheet pinned under the adjustable measuring stopper thing, but it took me a minute to find/extract that. :P
So I cut my 18"x24" sheets of Canson Illustration Paper three times to get three 18"x7.5" pieces--but I still need to slice an inch off one end of each one to get them down to the 17" length that my scanner accommodates. The Trimmer, though, is only about 14 cutting and measuring inches wide, so I can't measure 17" with it to slice them down to the final size, and jamming 1" in from the blade side doesn't really work because of the nifty automatic holder / safety thingy there (and it would probably be pretty dangerous anyway so I'm glad I'm not tempted to do it!), and because it's just hard to hold 1" of paper in place with 17" draped off the side. BUT! I found that the little adjustable measuring thingy, which I have to remove anyway to lay the sheets across the trimmer, is *exactly* 9.5 inches long, so if I lay it lengthwise along the track at the top of the trimmer, with one end on the 7.5" ruler mark, I then have a nice 17" measure to cut by. It would be nice if the board was 3" wider, and if the measuring thingy was a little more sturdy-feeling, but ah well.
The trimmer can't cut six of these pieces of 150 lb paper at once, at least not without getting a little jammed at the very end (I tried :P), but it can do three at once, so that's pretty all right I guess. Way faster and neater than cutting with scissors! :) I'm so enraptured with it I went and cut out three more pages just for fun, wooo.
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