Alternative Cutting Stand Design For Paper

I’ve written in the past about heavy duty paper as a cutting medium (Paper – The Next Tatami? (Spoiler: No)), and in that article I also included drawings for the stand I used. Apparently people found that helpful, so I’ll also give a write up of a new design I tried today.

The inspiration for this was Mikko Lehto, asking about making a more compact design. (I’m feeling like other people asked me and I forgot. But he’s the one who gave me drawings and inspired me to act.)

Update: Mikko built his version and it’s way better than my proof-of-concept:
Mikko Makes An Even Better Stand

Thinking back to when RJ McKeehan and I built our first stand a year ago this might also have been something we considered. We decided on the bigger option for two reasons:

This design would be very weak against twisting.
This design is much harder to put together with bolts that are removable, due to the angles.
We weren’t sure how much the support arm behind the paper would freak people out because they were afraid to cut it.

Having more experience with using paper as a cutting medium now, I’m not so concerned with #1 and #3. It would still be much harder to build using bolts and getting all the holes in line, but with screws that’s a non-issue. So I decided to give it a try.

Final Product

Here it is, in all its glory.

Doing it this way did indeed make me feel nervous about hitting the stand behind the paper… for the first cut. The distance is great enough that you’re not in risk of hitting the stand unless you’re hitting like ⅔ of the way from the tip to the hilt. And if you are lining up so close then I’m not particularly upset if you fail the cut.

Testing

One of the initial concerns with this design is there is no rotational support against twisting.

*The top is rotating side to side like this.*

And indeed if you grab the stand and shake it the top is not rigid, it will sway rotationally. But, that’s not what it’s meant to do. The questions are:

Will it fall apart from reasonable outside forces like being moved around the room.
Will it twist excessively when a bad cut pulls on the paper?

The answer for #1 was no. If does sway, but unless you’re cranking on it there is no issue. For #2 I picked up a synthetic and tried to smash the paper as hard as I could. It turns out I can sort of cut the paper with synthetic. Which then evolved into me trying out just what I could achieve with different types of focus, the results of which are here: Tip High, Hands Low – Lessons From Cutting With Synthetic and Foam Swords.

But I did also get some horrible cuts in. This one represents the top ripping almost off, which is probably the highest torque you’re able to generate – any higher and the paper will just come off completely. I didn’t notice any excessive sway, but at the same time a small amount would not have stood out against the violent sound and paper movement on impact. So more or less I say that the rotation is not a concern.

Conclusion

I think this is a very viable way to build a paper cutting stand. It’s much more compact than the two-column design, but it is much harder to make one which can be assembled/disassembled by hand.

Also, a side note for anyone cutting paper. If you’re cleaning up the paper will take up a lot of room if you’re just cramming it into garbage bags, but if you lay it out and fold it the package is actually pretty compact. This is probably two dozen cuts:

More Drawings

I basically didn’t measure anything when I built this, I just grabbed some pieces of lumber cut to convenient sizes and screwed them together. So you can do it quick and dirty using these measurements, or you can take some time and get something that is more precise (and put miters on your joints!).

I used 2×3’ because we happen to have a ton of it sitting in the school’s back room for reasons I won’t get into. Obviously whoever does this will probably be using something more like 2×4. Everything was screwed together.