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Tuesday, March 18th, 2008

Are Your Card Sleeves Too Wide?

Categories: [ DIY ]

I bought a pack of 25/8 x 35/8 card sleeves to protect my Citadels character cards, but they are of course too wide (they are meant for Magic The Gathering cards). The guy at the shop suggested I could melt the side with a lighter, but he meant it as a joke (I hope). But what actually works (I just tried) is a soldering iron.

The sleeves are made of polypropylene, which melts at about 170 °C, but doesn't burn before 570 °C, so it's quite safe if you have an adjustable temperature soldering iron. I tried to tracing a line slowly on the sleeve along a piece of PCB board (because it's a heat insulator, I wouldn't have tried this with a plastic or aluminium ruler), and it made a nice seal. I suppose that cutting along the seam with a hobby knife would remove the excess plastic without destroying the sleeve.

Next step, mass production (that is, 9 sleeves for the basic characters, and 10 more for the extended characters).

[ Posted on March 18th, 2008 at 10:11 | no comment | ]