Perforating is one of those processes that's pretty easy if you have the fancy equipment and nigh on impossible if you don't.
And again, in stepped Eric Johnson at NBLA to save the day with his recently acquired Rosback pin perforator. The Rosback is essentially a foot operated hole punch. But instead of punching three big holes so pages will fit in a binder, it punches many, many tiny holes in a straight line. Typical Rosback perforations have about 0.9mm diameter holes and the center-to-center distance is about 1.8mm. |
I made a lot of measurements and perforated a lot of plain-paper proofs to make sure I got the perfs in the right place.
It would have been sad to ruin a bunch of panes this late in the process. After squaring the fence to the row of pins, I just measured and marked a piece of tape stuck the the feed table with the position of each row. After that, it was just move to the mark and step on the pedal until I was done. (Okay, maybe it wasn't quite so simple if the picture on the left is any indication.) Measure twice, perf once? |
Even with these backing sheets, the holes were not perfectly clean. I guess maybe a century of use puts a little wear on things.
One advantage to the slightly rough holes is that the first line of perfs on a stack locked the stack together. This made handling the stack for all the subsequent lines a lot easier. |
With all the components complete, it was time to start assembling the booklets.