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when first starting out new bookbinders
faced a few hurdles one of them is
around access to equipment and one of
the first pieces of equipment that they
need is a guillotine to trim text box
every time I teach an introduction to
bookbinding course I get asked can you
trim a text block with a knife I've
tried this in the past and it's always
been a complete disaster but I've
decided to revisit it so here I am
trimming the text block with my favorite
knife and it's a complete disaster but I
noticed the problem was that the nine
millimeter blade was flexing an awful
lot so maybe the solutions a different
knife next night that I thought of was
the good old stanley 99e
I figured the blade on that's not gonna
flex
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so I managed to cut right through the
text block with a fairly vertical cut
but the edge is pretty rough but that
results not good enough for me but I did
notice that I think the problem was I
was putting too much pressure on the
knife so I thought I'm going to give it
another go with lighter cuts and I'm
also going to change the blade to a
fresh blade
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straightaway the lighter cuts feel like
it's going better so lots of light cuts
seems to be an improvement and I'm
putting a bit more pressure on the ruler
as well to compress the text block so
I'm pretty happy with that result
the heads a bit rough I thought about
that I thought maybe I could live with
it maybe not
and I thought y'all give it a bit of ass
and that's pretty common when you're
preparing an edge for an edge finish the
sanding paper looks really bad but I've
been sanding a bit or layer with if it's
nothing really
hurt the edge was a little bit of
sanding I I think if I was just starting
out and bookbinding and trying to decide
whether it's a hobby I was gonna keep
doing then I'd be pretty happy with that
result
but can I do better
decided the 99a
blade wasn't sharp enough so I decided
to try an 18 millimeter blade I hope
that that would be thick enough that it
wouldn't flex and straightaway it felt
like it was going a lot better
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so I'm pretty happy with that result
that's that's not as good as my
guillotine certainly not as good as a
play out but it's a it's a good good
enough job to keep going so now to do
the head and the tail it's going to use
a set square to make sure that I get the
cuts perpendicular and straight away I
noticed problem thus well at the tail
meant that I couldn't compress the text
block properly you can see it in this
from this angle you can see that the
spine is too thick well this is a common
problem when you're using a plow and the
solution is to round the board and that
gets rid of the swell so that's when I
go ahead and do around the book
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now with the book rounded the swells not
an issue at the spine since first
attempts going pretty good reasonably
happy with this it's good wonky at the
spine
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that one key patch was bothering me a
bit so I decided to see if I could trim
it up a bit and then I thought maybe I'd
take a bit of sandpaper to it as well
and see if I can fix it that way yep I'm
happy with that result so let's do the
tile now same thing is the set square to
make sure that it's a right angle that
starts off really well and then it goes
pear-shaped really quickly I'm sure what
I did differently but it just didn't
work yep not happy with that result at
all
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all right we'll give it another go
I also noticed that this was tough
making big gouges in my cutting mat so I
decided to put a bit of board underneath
it and it starts off pretty good that's
a good sign
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so I'm happy with that result so I think
that answer is that you can trim up a
textblock
with a knife and a ruler and the trick
is to use a very sharp knife that
doesn't flex and before doing the head
and the tail to round the text block
Oh
