Mat cutters

I've wanted a mat cutter for quite a while now. But which one to get? Who knows how many mats I really need to cut in the end? do I really need a $200+ piece of equipment? Well, if I indeed cut just like 5+ mats a month the thing quickly will pay for itself. But it's also bulky and it should not get stored upright but flat. That's quite a space commitment. The one I wanted is the Logan simplex 750 which has all the nice features and none of those that ordinary mortals don't need. But in the end, I decided to go with a small Logan Compact 301S because it was on sale and was only $80 ish. Here are my first observations.

• you can indeed do almost everything with the small one
  
• but, yes, the extra money for the extra features is totally worth it. Here is why:
  
• production stops are mostly for making several identical cuts in a row, you just cut till the hit the production stop, bingo, easy. But they also make it much easier to make exact cuts and help you avoid over- or under cuts. So they are worth it, I think.
  
• the squaring arm. That one is really for sizing mat board. Yes I can cut mat board on the small one, but correctly measuring it is a pain. AND on the 301S that I bought it requires a lot of fiddling to get the mat really correctly aligned (there is nothing to push the mat against to make a perfect 90 deg angle. You have to use a triangle ruler for that. Perfectly doable. Just more work and if you are sloppy like I often am you might end up with less than perfect angles.
  
• cutting down standard mat boards to a usable size is sort of doable with the compact cutter. But just "sort of". The board doesn't fit through the cutter, so if you want to - say - cut a mat board in half you are out of luck. Have it halved at the store or buy the more expensive half-boards right away. However, you can cut off 3" off the standard size board, turning it into a 40" x 29" which does fit through the mat cutter. Then you can continue from there. The full size cutters don't require that. But, of course they are an even larger piece of equipment to store (flat). Especially if you have that squaring arm too! And you don't want to have to put that piece on / take it off all the time.
  
• The guide rail of higher end cutters has a hinge, the 301s is spring loaded. Again no biggie but for very exact positioning the hinged version is much better, I think (not having tried it).
  

That much about compact/inexpensive vs. higher end mat cutters. Operating the cutter is a lot of fun. That could become a new hobby (yeah, I know, I desperately need another hobby! NOT!)
I noticed that the blades wear out surprisingly fast. I cut a small pile of 8x10 boards just for experiments and after 3-4 mats I had to rotate the blade. However I should mention that I forgot the backing sheet on three cuts (that happens very easily). That probably dulled the blade prematurely. But blades are inexpensive and it's much cheapter to replace them than to throw out a piece of mat board that was messed up by a bad blade.

Most standard mats at super easy to do, but when you try to do fancy mats "with cinnamon sprinkles" you might run into little problems like I did. Check out that photo below. Notice something? Oops? Two of the bevels are - well - the wrong way round. It looks quite nice, it just wasn't what I was trying to achieve. There is a trick to do tha, of course (it involves taping a piece of extra mat board to the side of your mat and stuff) but you have to *think* of that first.



I found this book very helpful: M.David Logan: Mat, Mount and Frame it yourself, Watson-Guptill, 2002. Describes pretty much everything you need. Including the trick to avoid those wrong bevels I just talked about. However it's a bit hidden. When they describe how to do a mat with a little title window it says you need to tape on some extra board to do one of the cuts. It does not say why. After the fact I realized that this is the trick I should have used for this mat.

Essentially, standard mat cutters cut a bevel that slopes away from the edge of the mat board. But, the mat guide typically can be set to only 4-5" as most mats are cut narrower than that. Now if you want to make a little title window below the main mat opening, you need to cut a bevel that slopes away from the far edge, which could be 20+" away. You are out of luck with the mat guide. You can take off the guide and use the good-ol' triangule ruler again (if your mat board fits through your mat cutter)... or you use the trick mentioned above and in the book.

Well, you learn something new every day :)