Pressing
With the covers on and the folding complete, the Passportos next spent the night in the nipping press. This standard piece of bindery equipment flattened the Passportos and sharpened the spine folds. This press came to us in distress, but some love in the workshop turned it into a nice birthday gift for Tristan. |
Trimming
Wait, didn't we trim stuff already? Yes we did. But now we need to trim again. During the last few steps (collating, sewing, adding the cover, and folding) it's possible...no, it's almost certain...that there will be some small misalignments in the edges of the leaves. Since we were trying for a clean, professional look we needed to get rid of those misalignments before we could call it done. Doing so was straightforward, at least in concept. All the leaves were initially cut oversized by 4 mm top-to-bottom and 8 mm side-to-side. By doing this, we could trim 2 mm off the head and tail and 4 mm off the fore edge of the folded Passporto and end up at our final size. As long as the misalignments were less than these trim allowances, they would basically disappear. |
Yup, it's this guy again.
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The foredge trim also cleaned up the inevitable differences in leaf width due to the thickness of the stack. The outer leaves have to fold around the inner leaves so they will always end up narrower. This gives the fore edge a tapered look, with the text leaves sticking out of the cover. A nice, square edge is a more professional look.
Conceptually straightforward as is was, practically the trimming was a bit tricky. To have a hope of finishing the Passportos in time for us to sail, we needed to trim them in stacks of at least 10. Even doing so meant doing 180 accurate cuts! The problem with trimming a stack of booklets is that they aren't perfectly flat, despite our efforts (see pressing above) to make them so. The stacks tended to want to shift around as they were clamped before trimming and it took a lot of careful attention to keep them in place to achieve a decent result. Note the use of the word "decent". This is one of the steps in the process where we could definitely improve the quality of the results. |
Finishing
The last finishing step is where we rounded the corners. Like a clean spine and a square fore edge, rounded corners gave the Paspportos a more professional look. This little Akiles table-top corner rounder can be had from many on-line sources for around $150. Without one, nice, clean rounded corners would be a challenge. But having one, rounding the corners was as simple as choosing the blade with the radius we wanted, putting 3 or 4 Passportos into the machine and pulling the handle. A few hundred times. |
Packaging
After putting all this effort into making something nice for folks to enjoy on the cruise we didn't want anything bad to happen to them before we could get them into the hands of the players. Some protective packaging was required. That was easy enough because inexpensive, durable plastic envelopes in a wide array of sizes are available all over the internet for not much money. We got 1000 self-sealing, 4" x 6" envelopes from Amazon for less then 2 cents each. One sort of funny thing about using these envelopes was that they tended to hold air like very thin balloons. To minimize the space 600 Passportos took up in our luggage we had to press the air out of stacks of them before bundling them up. |
The very last step was to add label so we could write the name of the recipient on it. We delivered about 200 Passportos the first night of the cruise (or was it the second morning?) to folks who requested one ahead of time. We got our steps that day for sure.
The remaining Passportos went onto a table in one of the common areas for folks to pick up if they wanted to play. They were all gone in a couple of days. The 590 finished Passportos were enough for somewhere between a quarter and a third of the cruise attendees to play. We don't know how many actually played, though. Turns out the staff of Holland America Lines Nieuw Amsterdam thought the game was so cool that a whole bunch of them played along! |
Finally, after about 3 months of work, the Passportos were complete. Now we just needed some stamps to put in them. So back to the design phase we went.