Book Routing

This past week saw three attempts at routing books.

The book: "Sweet's Catalog File."

Reasons why: The standard tome of building materials, they're ubiquitous, plentiful, and, at least nowadays, basically useless. Not only have they been digitized, but even in their prime they were updated and reprinted annually, meaning they found homes under drafting tables in a period of 12 months or less. I also like them because they're endemic to this building, architectural artifacts. The almanac of materials becomes obsolete, then becomes a material.

The first attempt (Sweet's 1995, Volume 2) uncovered several issues before it was aborted. For one, the covers of these books (old card) are messy under the router and cast off some nasty particulates. Once the bit reached the paper, things got more interesting. The square cut in the lower right (the opening of a joint, maybe) was reasonably clean and taught, as was the pocket (surface cut) above it. The concave cut close to the binding was less clean - after the first incision, the remainder of each page was sucked upward and led the bit to miss pieces of each page. After a few passes like this the router caught the binding, causing the book to spin and forcing us to stop. [Seen below are the 3D file and the mangled book]

More to come