Comment by noisy_boy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by noisy_boy | Hacker News Reader

> debinding

When I was in school, there was a binding shop nearby which had a huge machine that looked pretty much like a guillotine, only shallower, that just sliced through thick books like butter. They stuck the book in a vice grip, turned a wheel which brought that beautiful sharp heavy blade down on the hopeless book stuck in the grip below and the paper shavings just blossomed out of the other side as the blade did its job.

One of the favorite things for us to do was to bring an old book to the shop and ask then to shave off few millimeters on each side (except the spine of course) - the frayed/yellow bits were gone and your book was new and born again :) This also was a great strategy if you wanted to reduce the dimensions of your book. Obviously only works with paperbacks and can't be repeated more than 3-4 times. I loved it then.

> In this case, I have to use a heat gun, aiming them at the glued issues of Computer Shopper, warming them up until the glue starts to become slightly liquid and then carefully pulling the pages apart from each other, placing them on a large table I’m working on. If the glue comes too close to the pages after I pull them apart, it actually sticks them back again. It’s a huge mess, and with hundreds of pages in a typical issue, hours of work.

I wonder if instead of using heat-gun to de-glue (?), it would be easier to just shave off an ever thin slice of that spine?

(sorry if that was too gruesome for you).

Hydraulic drive paper cutters are great for high-volume print finishing (I used several in print production for about two years), but I’d be wary of them for this use case:

- Waste is high. To trim off a spine, you likely have to take more of the margin than you’d like (if you trim too close to the edge of a glued spine, the risk is higher that you may bludgeon the stack of pages under pressure instead of cutting it). Not great for double page spreads or Computer Shopper’s anaemic margins.

- Failure rate is non-zero. If you’re cutting a fresh print run, no big deal, you can reprint if you screw up. If you’re cutting rare magazines, you probably don’t want to lose many to slippage or mis-cuts.

- The blade needs regular sharpening, and it’s not something you can easily do in a home workshop, or that you probably want to do (huge heavy razor blades turn out to be quite dangerous).

What _might_ help Jason more is a “thermal binding machine”, designed to bind or debind a glued spine. He could (in theory) leave each mag in the debinder for a set time to heat the glue, then pry the pages free. Not a huge improvement over a hairdryer, but at least more hands-free, especially if people could donate or loan multiple machines.

What if instead of cutting, we sanded them? The pressure on the surfaces would be smaller and it could remove just enough to debind the volume.

Nice idea but I would be worried about tearing.

I don’t know what the actual paper weight is but it looks in the “bible paper and cheap newsprint” range (~40-60gsm), which will probably rip as soon as a belt/orbital sander crosses the glue line into the looser leaves (and you have to cross the glue line to debind, and by nature that line isn’t normally straight, because glue does not melt evenly). You also destroy the spine, making it harder to identify issues at a glance.

A thermal binding machine would likely melt the glue in 45-90 seconds without those risks. And you might even be able to rebind after the scan with fresh glue strips using the same machine, assuming you don’t have to cut the cover wrap.

I briefly experiment with that for books before switching to a guillotine. It was slower, and made a mess. Even when I thought all the dust/grit was gone, some snuck into the scans anyway. For softer lower-quality aged acid-attacked newsprint-style magazines like this, I imagine the mess would be even worse.

Using heat is common in a similar hobby(?), translating (older) Japanese manga. You would use a hair dryer or clothesiron to melt the glue in the spine, pull apart the pages/clean off the glue, and scan them in. That way you don't shave off 2-page spreads. (After scanning, you'd have to clean up the image a lot still, but oh well.) I can imagine here you also just don't want to damage the pages, even if the damage seems infinitesimal.

It doesn't happen so much anymore for manga since things are mostly digital. Though some publishers still publish at 1200x800 (looking at you, Hakusensha!) or worse (I think one site uses like, 900x600?). Mostly these days this would only happen for self-published works (which are still distributed in limited quantities and in physical format only, oftentimes). Or apparently publishers occasionally just...lose the digital files. (Though I can't find where I read this anymore.)

> That way you don't shave off 2-page spreads.

A very good point

Also, people have already contributed thousands for this project, asking for a cutty-cutty machine is a bit much, especially when I'm really getting good with the heat gun.

Scientists routinely request more grant money for research whose difficulty exceeds initial estimates. You're already doing an incredible thing; it is okay to ask for more assistance.

So many pages were the same unchanged ads in the Shopper every month. Can't you add in some prefiltering for those to reduce the number of pages actually needed to scan? (Sorry for hijacking the thread...)

No

Upvoted with extra strong mouse click on account of cutty-cutty machine.

If you are okay with cutting the spine off, you don’t need a big hydraulic cutter to do it (even though it is objectively the coolest way). Clamping a straightedge to the book and running a knife along that edge will cut a handful of pages very cleanly, you just run the knife through over and over. A metal ruler and a Stanley knife will do this just fine - heavy pressure on the ruler and light passes with the Stanley knife. (This is what amateur bookbinders do to trim the edges of books they’re binding when they don’t have access to proper guillotines.)

Something like this? https://www.whitakerbrothers.com/products/martin-yale-7000e

Similar but 4-5 times as bigger - it could have chopped my 12 year old body in half. A beast of a machine.

(I don't know what has come over me - my mind is only producing grisly descriptions)

Probably more like one of these, a hydraulic guillotine cutter.

https://youtu.be/RZD0XHp75S4

https://youtu.be/BvLk6-OugIc

These will easily take a hand off so most of the machines designed after the mid-80s required the operator to press two buttons as a safety to cut and a pedal to initiate the clamp. The older ones from the 70s just required a push on a pair of foot pedals, or a pedal and a single button -- which was obviously stupid. Once the safer machines came around we got those.

I used to operate one as a kid in middle/high school before I went off to college. You can fit measure to sub-mm precision before clamping and making the cut. It was a really beautiful thing to see it cleave the edges off of several inches of paper like a hot knife cutting through room temperature butter. A real shame filling up bins and bins and bins of cuttings to toss in the trash (this was before recycling was a common thing).

Changing the blades was quite the ordeal and you had to do it frequency to send off for regrinding. At least on the machines we had. They're basically 20+lb razer blades.

Source: I grew up in a family printing business and we had machines like this to cut the margins and printer marks off of the edges of fresh printed material to help get it ready for binding or delivery. Almost every printed page goes through something like this.

Oh, those machines are pretty satisfying to use and watch. In the 00's I did a lot of IT support for print shops (I still hate the RIP server and the Fiery, although I haven't seen one for 20 years) and the guillotines fascinated me.

> huge machine that looked pretty much like a guillotine

My local binding shop actually still operates one of those.

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