Guillotine cutter?

[matrixman]

What do you all use?  I ordered the below on Amazon and it worked for first 20 mags and now cant even cut all way thru and pulls mag at end.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003D6JQ62

Thinking of taking blade out to see if it can be sharpened at sharpening services.

[kitsunebi]

I only use a heat gun on squarebound mags. Scissors on stapled mags (anything else might be a tiny bit straighter, but will ultimately be less precise.)

I tend to view almost all scans which were debound using a guillotine cutter as candidates for a rescan.  It may not aversely affect most pages, but it usually ruins any pages with visual elements crossing from one page to the next.  Two-page ads are especially affected detrimentally this way, which for my money are some of the most preservation-worthy pages in any magazine.

Imagine if a site "preserving" movie posters constantly turned out scans like this?

 

[PixelBoy]

  On 2/3/2024 at 10:04 PM, kitsunebi said:

Scissors on stapled mags (anything else might be a tiny bit straighter, but will ultimately be less precise.)

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That will get nice whole separate pages, yes.

But it is also possible to pull the staples out and leave the magazine intact. Obviously it would be much harder to scan those big sheets, but the plus side is that you can put the staples back through the same holes again. And if you were careful enough when removing staples, you can even use the same staples.

That way you can reconstruct a magazine that had 100% health bar to begin with to have a magazine that has maybe 90% health bar. And this has of course nothing to do with the OP question, to which I have no real answer.

[kitsunebi]

  On 2/4/2024 at 3:29 PM, PixelBoy said:

But it is also possible to pull the staples out and leave the magazine intact. Obviously it would be much harder to scan those big sheets, but the plus side is that you can put the staples back through the same holes again. And if you were careful enough when removing staples, you can even use the same staples.

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In theory, you're correct.  In practice, it's very difficult removing the staples from a 30 year old, 250 page issue of Famitsu without completely mangling the shape of the staples beyond repair.  And you'd have to special order new staples, since magazines don't use normal staples (which are designed for stapling a few sheets of paper), but rather staples of varying lengths depending on how many pages they've got to go through.  And I can't even imagine how much time it would take to put staples through that many pages by hand, since you'd probably have to do it a single page at a time.

On much thinner and newer Western mags, it might be a lot easier, though you'd still be stuck with pages that could only be scanned on an A3 document scanner (which I don't own, since they typically cost $1500+) or else on a flatbed (which you would have to pay me $1500+ to use, because they're a huge pain in the ass LOL.)

The bottom line is, anyone who considers their magazines to be so precious that they would go to such trouble in order to try to have their cake and eat it too, as it were, is probably not someone who is going to ever contribute much in the way of actual scans.  We're making omelettes here, those eggs have gotta be broken.  The first cut is the hardest, but once you're able to slice and dice your magazines without hesitation, you've awakened the heart of the scanner within.

That said, I still believe that SOME extra time should be taken in the debinding stage to make sure we aren't slicing and dicing away part of the printed page, as happens when using a guillotine cutter.  A non-destructive debinding DOES take longer, but why destroy a magazine only to get an incomplete scan?