Use Cardboard if you get frustrated with wood

[mutantstrain]

I think Dan used cardboard with his very first attempt, and so did I. While ideally I woulda/shoulda used wood ... or even aluminum I found it too frustrating to work with.

I remember when I went to school there was an Architecture school right next door. They simply used cardboard and wood glue to put all these wild designs together. Soo ...... that gave me an idea for this project!!!

Using cardboard, box cutters, a ruler, and glue one can easily make a sturdy book holder base!!! If you want to make something hardy just double up on the cardboard and glue it together. Maybe its not as sturdy as wood, but for this project ... who cares!

For the platen itself I used two wooden picture frames glued together at a roughly 90 degree angle.

Cheapo clamps, a hinge, a few wood screws, two Canon a590is's, two cheap tripods, a Ricoh CA-1, an old sharp mobile phone charger, a Dell Monitor (with RCA jack), an RCA video switch off of Ebay, two halogen lamps, some soldering ... some thinking, and some work produced this....


Picture taking alone, I can scan around 300 pages every 15 minutes.
more pics here: http://picasaweb.google.com/visiondocto ... ookScanner

[daniel_reetz]

Awesome stuff... CAD (Cardboard Aided Design) is a great way to go. I love cardboard, and so do a lot of people here... I think StevePoling was the one that called it CAD.

[StevePoling]

I stole the term CAD (cardboard-aided design) from an automotive engineer from Jaguar. He bragged about working out the hinge for a car's "bonnet" with bits of cardboard and paper fasteners. He had to satisfy constraints of lifting the hood up to clear the windshield wipers and then tilting the hood back. We were messing with 3d design programs with finite-element methods and he just chuckled.

I used cardboard and duct-tape to work out my ideas for an "air platen." Only downside was things got floppy after a few hundred pages. By that time I'd learned the pros/cons of the approach and could commit to a 2nd generation using model aircraft plywood and bits of inner-tube