Wally, or they could break loose with some cash and buy a set of Spyderco's and put an edge on their blades that a surgeon would be proud to use!!
(For the benefit of neilframer, I wasn't
trying to help, I was being facetious. One Spyderco ceramic stone will cost more than many
many boxes of mat cutter blades!)
It seems that people lose track of what real workmanship involves sometimes in their rush to get something done within a deadline but, in this supposedly "perfect" world we have today things don't always go exactly perfectly when hand crafting items. Every so often you have to take a piece of fine sandpaper and touch up an edge or tweak some minor adjustment that may have gotten out of kilter on your mechanical cutter or CMC or maybe adjust your stance or "draw" on your blade as you move your mat cutter through its paces.
Granted, Crescent board has historically been noted for being the "problem" child of the mat board lines but the other brands are far from problem free if you think about it. Nothing has been mentioned thus far about condition of the mat cutter, type of cutter, stance of the person doing the cutting, technique used to enter and exit the board with the blade, condition of the blade, number of cuts the blade has made, and so many other tiny little procedural points that can mean the difference in the quality of a mat cut.
Rag mat is one of the most difficult boards to cut and much of the difficulty lies in it's makeup and methods of manufacture. Rag mat is composed of cotton linters, small particles of cotton which are compressed together to make a board. There is very little structural strength in most 100% rag boards (compared to other types of mat boards), never has been, and probably never will if the integrity of the board is maintained for conservation purposes. The 1100 non-surfaced natural colored rag has a further problem in that it has no paper covering to "bind" the facing surface together so you are effectively pushing small particles of cotton rag out of the board itself if you don't use an absolutely sharp mat blade.
A slip sheet is something that a beginning basic framer is made aware of and is nothing new to the trade. I don't think I have ever known a professional framer who didn't use a slip sheet under a mat as a matter of normal procedure. Even when cutting stacked multiple mats, your first cut mat with fallout becomes your "slip sheet" for your next mat and so on. Maybe they are teaching the procedures differently today with all the computer technology changing the way we do things but sometimes it pays to listen to some of these "old timers" and stick you pride in your hip pocket for awhile and try something "new" that has been around for many years.
And, as a final note, we learned to take the time to examine each piece of cut mat, every leg of each mitered frame moulding, and each piece of glass to ensure that there are no tiny flubs that may have escaped our attention. That was a part of the job for us and it should still be a final "never break it" rule for anyone who wants to put out top quality work. I have sanded more beveled edges and tweaked more miters to make them "just right" and I have torn down, cleaned, and adjusted all of my equipment on a regular schedule so many times that I couldn't guess a number and it wasn't to impress anyone with how anal I was about having things right, it was my own personal work ethic and habits that I had formed over the years to make my work the very best that I knew how to offer my customers.
That was just how it was back then ...................
