Page: Guide.PlastifyPage1 - Last Modified : Tue, 23 Jun 09 - 3195 Visits

The first thing you need to know is if you have the material to do the job. There are various ways to do the job and some material are harder to find than others. I'll first start with the basic stuff.

Common material: The most common material I use is shown in the picture to the right. First you need scissors and or an exacto knife. It depends of how you like to works sometimes it works better with scissors, sometime it's with the knife. If you use the knife, you need a cutting mat unless you want to leave scratches on your table. Then a ruler is always useful to take measurements and draw the outline to cut. Of course you need a pen to draw the outline. The flat white tool at the bottom of the picture is called a "bone folder" according to Brodart. It is used to press the plastic on the surface. I use a towel for the initial pressing of the plastic. Finally, you need a roll of adhesive plastic normally used to protect books. Some of the material above will generally be sold in library supplies store like in Brodart.

About the adhesive plastic : Note that there are different thickness and quality. Those sold in regular office supply stores are sometimes not that good compared to library supply store. Still you might be lucky. The main problem is the level of adhesivity. Cheap plastic does not stick on short and long term. Some plastic are removable, this is usually bad because it will never adhere complely to the surface. But some plastic a removable for a limited time. After a few hours, it holds on correctly. You can always make some test on books. If you plastify the cover of a book, when you fold the plastic over the top and back of the cover, it the plastic does not hold in place, then it's a bad plastic.

Card sleeves: Card sleeves are great and they can protect any card easily. The problem arise when they don't fit in the sleeves. Many euro games and fantasy flight games use cards which are a bit more narrow. The solutions is to buy euro sleeves which are really hard to find right now, or cut them with a plastic bag sealer. Unfortunately, my plastic bag sealer is deas, so I won't be able to show this technique yet.

Improvised Press: Sometimes, you need to place your components under pressure. It is generally the case if you are using glue or cheap adhesive plastic. Since not everybody have a press, you can make one yourself using books. I generally use role playing games books for their very large covering space and I use dictionaries and computer related books for their weight. If you press something that is glued, place a sheet of paper so some other thing to protect your books in case the glue leak.

Other materials

There are other material you can use that I will not talks about yet in this guide.

Laminators: First there are laminators, these tools does a great job but you can only plastify thin components like cards, and you need to leave some space all around the thing you plastified, making the card or sheet bigger. If you want o buy a laminator, always use hot sealing laminators, the cold ones are not that good. Second you need to consider the thickness of the film. Generally .3 and .5 are generally OK, .10 are very thick. Even if you intend to plastify only cards, I strongly suggest not buying small laminators for individual cards. Use 8-1/2 x 11 sheets can cut out the cards.

Acrylic Spray Sealer: it's like a varnish in a spray, it should be useful to protect very large components like maps or board which are larger that the plastic roll. It could also be useful to plastify boxes. I don't have much experience yet with sealing spray, I'll have to make some tests first. Apparently some spray decolorize the cardboard.

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