Rotatrim Pro 54 Inch Cut Professional Paper Cutter/Trimmer Precision Rotary Trimmer with Self-Sharpening Precision Steel Blades & Twin Stainless Steel Guide Rails (RCPRO54i)

Super high quality and easy to use. It feels very robust and heavy duty. I was hesitant to spend the cash at first but after using it a few times, I have no regrets.

This is the one, found it! I have been looking for a solid, dependable, accurate, sturdy trimmer for years now, and have spent far too much time and money on purchases that ended in major compromises or repeated returns. No more. After a lot of useless consumer grade trimmers and years of research, I found this rotary trimmer after watching a YouTube video. If you need to cut large amounts of cardstock or paper like I do, and need something that is as efficient as it is reliable, and are genuinely willing to spend what it takes (a sizeable amount) - then this is the trimmer for you. (1) This is no hobby grade trimmer - it seems to be built for commercial or heavy duty use. This is not something you put away in some shelf in the corner corner and take out every time you need it. Be prepared to dedicate some space for it. And it is heavy, so the table better be sturdy and not wobbly. (2) The placeholder thing has a sturdy screw to keep it firmly at the desired measurement. When loosened, it glides without drama until you tighten the screw at the next position. This has been a major timesaver for me. I just set it to the measurement I need and cut in bulk before setting it to the next measurement and then cut in bulk once again until I get the final dimensions I need. (3) If you get the model I have, you could actually convert this it a bidirectional trimmer - provided you follow the manufacturer's instructions to the letter (watch simple YouTube video) and take all necessary precautions for your own safety (working with blades here!). Read the various options closely before buying as this option is not available in all sizes and these features might possibly change over the years. This adjustment means that I can cut by sliding the blade up, slip the next sheet in, slide the blade down to cut again, and then back up for the next sheet of paper. So I'm essentially cutting with every pass of the blade - fewer movements and less time. (4) This thing is accurate! That's something we should be able to take for granted with any trimmer, but you'd be surprised (and then shocked, frustrated.. etc) at some of the trimmers out there. This one finally gave me the consistent accuracy that I was looking for. (5) This is NOT cheap. But it is worth the money for all the reasons mentioned above, especially to someone who cuts a lot of paper or cardstock in bulk and has wasted far too much time and money on inaccurate and lower quality junk trimmers (also found on Amazon of course). For context, I regularly cut 300 GSM heavyweight cardstock with this trimmer - but one sheet at a time. You might get a jagged edge if you try 2 sheets of 300GSM per cut - and that's overkill IMO anyway.. Thinner papers are a breeze too. The plastic band that you slip the paper under has just the right amount of tension to let a single sheet pass underneath. The only thing I would wish could be different is the location of the sliding placeholder and raised edge. Ideally, it would be on the bottom end rather than at the top (or both ends even!). With the configuration for the model that I have, I have to use the top edge for measurements if I choose to slide the trimmer blade with my right hand and use my left hand to hold the paper down. That means leaning across the entire length of the trimmer with my arm stretched out completely to reach this top edge when cutting vertically. So that's everything I could think of after using this trimmer for nearly 4 months. Hope you found this helpful!

In terms of what I use it for, it is used in cutting sublimation prints. It is hands down the best cutter I have personally every used, and has the precision behind it that gets an A+ in my books. Worlds better than any guillotine or standard sliding cutting I’ve ever used. Although it is more expensive than the other types of cutters, the price shows itself in the quality. It’s a well-weighted piece of engineering that allows you to take hair-thin slivers off of the paper you’re cutting if you have a minor imperfection. The issue I ran into with other cutters is the fact that when I tried to do the same, even a slight angle with a cheaper cutter would cause it to bunch up. This allows me to essentially triple my cutting speed for sublimation prints if not faster than that. Can even handle a few papers at a time with zero issue.

I previously was using a guillotine trimmer, but wasn't loving it. I was so happy I switched to this trimmer. At this point I've had it for nearly a year, and I use it for maybe an hour everyday for my business. It cuts very heavy fine art paper, and still the blade is sharp and works well. If I ever have to replace this trimmer, I will be buying another rotatrim.

I couldn’t find a decent review of this trimmer before buying it. And so the review I wished I could have read is the review I have tried to write: ***Summary*** When it works, this is more or less the top of the line when it comes to paper trimmers for home or studio use. There is a level above Rotatrim, but those trimmers are meant for sign companies who cut large amounts of canvas or PVC poster material daily. These trimmers start at several thousand dollars and are never made smaller than four or five feet. If you want something that’ll last forever, and you’ll never need to trim anything longer than about three feet, a well set-up Rotatrim is as good as you can get in a rotary trimmer. Certainly it is the heaviest. Mine is almost 17 lbs. This trimmer has a baseboard made of particle board coated with an Ultra-high-molecular-weight polyethylene. It has a grid printed on it keyed to the Imperial system. The grid is quite true and is made of 1/4” squares. There’s also a scale in millimeters. The UHMWPE is slick and resists the adhesion of things like masking tape. There are five high quality, squishy rubber feet on the underside that work well to keep the trimmer in place. The blade is actually two blades. One is a circle and travels with the cutting head. The other is straight and lies along one side of the trimmer. The circular blade slices paper against the straight blade somewhat in the same way that scissors cut paper between two blades that close. The circular blade and the flat blade are made such that they tend to keep each other sharp by rubbing against one another. Rotatrim claims a very long lifetime for the blades because of this self-sharpening. Anecdotally, this seems to be true. I have seen 20 year-old Rotatrims that still cut quite well. The Rotatrim blade will definitely be much sharper for far longer than trimmers that have one very sharp round blade that cuts into a soft piece of plastic, like the cheaper Carls and Dahles. Those blades are basically round x-acto knives and are meant to be replaced after a few hundred cuts. Paper is surprisingly abrasive and all those cellulose fibers will quickly dull even a very sharp blade made from hard steel. ***The Problems*** The 20” trimmer I received was either not properly set up at the factory, or went badly out of spec when shipped. These were the problems I noticed and how I fixed them: 1. The piece of extruded aluminum used to square up paper so that the left hand edge of the sheet you want to trim is exactly 90º relative to the blade is called the side rule. On my trimmer it was not aligned at 90º to the blade. Therefore aligning paper with the side rule produced cuts that were not square. This was easy to see when I looked at the long, thin strips trimmed from the sheet of paper I was cutting. These strips were long rectangles. Because the side rule was not at 90º to the blade, the two short sides of these long, thin rectangles were very different lengths. With paper 8.5” wide I was getting size discrepancies I could see with the naked eye, something over an 1/8th of an inch. The paper I was trimming therefore had one edge out of square with the other three. (Note that this is a different problem from the cuts not being straight, the cut edges were always quite straight even with the paper out of square because of a crooked side rule.) 2. This is unacceptable, but fixable. Take a piece of ordinary lined paper and snug it up to the side rule. Bring one of the lines on the paper right up to the edge of the blade, as though to cut the line in half. Make a cut. If your side rule is out of square, you’ll see the paper get cut crookedly, with one side of the trimmed piece having more line than the other. If this happens, you need to square up the side rule. 3. The side rule is attached to the baseboard by three screws. Pry the plastic cap off the end of the side rule farthest from the blade. (See photo 4) Unscrew the black metal thing called the cursor. Slide it down and off the side rule. This lets you carefully peel off the black strip of plastic on top of the side rule that says “Original Rotatrim Product” etc. (See photo 3) The strip of plastic is held down by a layer of rubber cement that stays sticky after the strip is peeled away, so you’ll have no trouble re-adhering it. Peeling away the plastic strip reveals the three screws. (See photo 7) 4. These are not Philips head screws, they are a related fastener commonly used in Europe and the UK called Pozidriv. You can tell by the four dashes stamped into the head of the screw at the center of the cross. (See photo 2) The side rule is attached to the baseboard by Pozidriv size 1 screws. It’s better to use Pozidriv screwdrivers on these fasteners but these screws were designed to work with Philips screwdrivers as well. There will be some play but if you’re careful you won’t strip the screws with a #1 Philips screwdriver. (Conversely, Pozidriv screwdrivers cannot and should not be used with Philips head screws; they will always cam out and strip the screw.) 5. Carefully loosen the top and bottom of the three screws, leaving the center screw tight. Don’t remove them: loosen the screws by a turn or two. Remember: this is a piece of particle board and that you get one shot at screwing anything into material like that. Never remove any screws from particle board that you need to put back if you can possibly help it. Loosening the top and bottom screws will leave the side rule able to pivot about the center screw. 6. Get the strip you trimmed off earlier from the lined sheet. Looking at which end of the trim has more or less line on it, it’s easy to figure out whether the side rule needs to be rotated clockwise or counterclockwise around the center screw. If the center screw is fairly tight you ought to be able to just nudge the side rule a bit and then make a cut down another line on the paper to see if the problem has gotten better or worse. Repeat this until you can cut the lined paper straight down one of its lines, cutting a line exactly in half. 7. Once you can do that, carefully tighten the top and bottom screws attaching the side rule to the baseboard. Double check that you can still cut a line exactly in half to verify that tightening the top and bottom screws hasn't torqued the side rule out of square. Then lay the black plastic strip back into its channel and stick the end cap back into the piece of extruded aluminum at the bottom of the side rule. You can put the cursor back on if you’ll need it. 8. The other problem I noticed was that the two end frames had come loose. When I ran the blade along the rails until it hit the two rubber o-rings at each end of the double rails, the end frames moved a bit. The problem was that the two screws attaching each end frame to the baseboard had come loose. These are Pozidriv size 2 screws and are on the underside of the baseboard. (See photo 1) These were quite loose and I was able to tighten all four screws by almost two turns. You can get away with a #2 Philips screwdriver to tighten them; conveniently, this the most common size available. After tightening, the end frames no longer moved when the cutting head hit them through the o-rings. (I’m not sure how much these loose end frames actually affected the accuracy.) 9. Once I’d fixed these two problems I was able to trim paper such that the rectangular strips I removed had short sides whose lengths differed by about a tenth of a millimeter. (See photo 8 for the two ends of this strip compared to one another, and photos 5 and 6 for the ends of this strip against a little scale bar.) If you’re interested, it's easy to use that error to calculate how close the corrected side rule is to 90º. It goes like this, a) The sheet of lined test paper is 8.5” wide, which is 215.9mm. b) The cutter is making rectangular strips that are, let’s say, 0.1mm longer or shorter at the far end compared to the near end. c) To find the angle of the side rule that produces this error let’s imagine making a very, very skinny right triangle by slicing off the error of 0.1mm to leave a perfectly squared off piece of paper. This sliced off error will be our very skinny triangle. This very very skinny triangle would have one side that is 8.5” (215.9mm) long, a tiny side at 90º to this that is 0.1mm tall and a third side with some length we don’t care about. d) The angle opposite the side that is 0.1mm tall will be the deviation of the side rule from 90º. e) The angle (θ) we care about is easily found. First we find the ratio of opposite (0.1) over adjacent (215.9) sides. That is, the tangent of θ, 0.1 ÷ 215.9 = 0.000463 f) You could take the arctangent of this number to get the angle but tiny angles like this answer can also simply be approximated in radians so, θ ≈ 0.000463 radians g) To convert radians to degrees you multiply by (180 ÷ π), 0.000463 × (180 ÷ π) ≈ 0.0265º h) So if the cutter is trimming away long rectangles whose short ends differ in length by 0.1mm it means that the corrected side rule is plus or minus 0.02º from exactly 90º, that is, somewhere between 89.98º and 90.02º relative to the blade. That’s as good as I could get just from nudges to the side rule. If you had a proper machinist's square you could maybe do better by unscrewing the long plastic clamp that keeps the paper flat (Pozidriv size 1's), letting one leg of the square hang over the straight blade and aligning the side rule to the other leg. 0.1mm may well be about the limit of this cutter. Assuming that’s true, and you square up your side rule like mine, this means you should expect anything you trim to have a cut edge that is very slightly angled. The longer the piece of paper you’re trimming, the more you’ll notice this. The cutter I have tops out at 20”, so with a sheet that long I would expect my maximum error to be around 0.5mm out of square. Assuming all of this scales linearly, here's a quick table of the largest errors you should expect from this line of Rotatrims when used with their maximum paper sizes: RCPRO12i 12″.......0.30 mm RCPRO15i 15″.......0.38 mm RCPRO18i 18″.......0.45 mm RCPRO20i 20″.......0.50 mm RCPRO24i 24″.......0.60 mm RCPRO30i 30″.......0.75 mm RCPRO36i 36″.......0.90 mm RCPRO42i 42″.......1.05 mm RCPRO54i 54″.......1.35 mm 10. Lastly, Rotatrim sells a lubricant meant for the rails. This is just a silicone spray lube. The cutting head was a little bit squeaky out of the box. Spraying some WD-40 silicone lube on a cloth and rubbing this on the rails took care of the noise. Silicone is preferred because it dries, unlike petroleum-based lubricant, and so does not hold dust. ____________________________________________________________ ***The Upshot*** As far as I can tell, these are the only three pieces of “maintenance” you should have to do when you receive this trimmer. For almost $300 you would think the trimmer would arrive with a square side rule, tight end frames and a lubed rail. But Pro series or not, this trimmer is held together with what are essentially wood screws, not machine screws. Wood screws have a much bigger groove between the threads than machine screws and so are especially prone to working loose under any vibration the trimmer may experience during shipping. It’s all fixable, but if I had known that I would have to do my own quality assurance right out of the box I probably would have kept looking and bought a Dahle 554. None of these problems will go away until Rotatrim starts using something more serious than particle board, or begins using threaded inserts in their current baseboards (and more lube). These threaded inserts could then accept machine screws that can be secured with Loctite to keep everything tight and square during shipping. The problems I noticed with this trimmer may explain why Rotatrim doesn't sell directly to the US market, and relies on importers instead. The cardboard box this trimmer came in had two moulded styrofoam shoulders holding the end frames, a few rubber bands immobilizing the cutter head, and that's it. The styrofoam pieces were a bit broken and it is not difficult to imagine them getting pulverized by rougher shipping. It seems clear to me that Rotatrim's packaging was not meant to endure shipping much longer than the packages would experience being moved around the UK, or perhaps to the EU. If you are buying one of these trimmers anywhere except those places I think you should anticipate a tune-up like the kind detailed above. Your mileage may vary.

Professional quality cutter have used in photo lab. This one bought for paper & card stock.