Taking a bit of a detour from our normal mixture of cars and home improvement stuff, I'm going to talk about a little pet project that popped up at the spur of the moment. The beginning of the project really started off probably over 20 years ago when me and the old man was working on something in the house we used to live in in the Chicago suburbs. I had to reach down into a heater vent in what was my old childhood bedroom, if I recall to reach for a wire being run through the wall via the heater vent where it terminated at the wall. The forced air heating system was a later addition to this house so the ductwork was not original to the house.
Anyway, while reaching into the vent, I felt something kind of weird. It wasn't wet or furry or anything that would indicate that it was a dead animal so I further reached for it and grabbed it to pull it free. Curious as to what it was the old man watched as I removed the item only to be surprised at what it was. It was an old newspaper. Carefully opening it up to see the date, it turned out the paper was from 1912! That was one helluva find in this dusty heater vent of this house that apparently must date back to earlier than that. So with that find I felt I was holding on to gold as a teenager. Of course as a teenager I wasn't exactly smart on many things. When it comes to something like this, most wiser people would think about trying to preserve such an artifact. But what does a teen do? He puts the thing in a plastic bag. So yep, this then at the time 75 year old newspaper ended up in a plastic bag. Periodically I would run across this bag and open it up to look at the old paper to remind me of this old artifact but otherwise, it stayed in the plastic bag for years and years. Fast forward to now. After moving to the South, the paper came along with everything else but still stayed in that same plastic bag, which surprisingly came from a now defunct hardware store called "Builder's Square". Of course as time progressed, so did the degradation of the paper. As the years passed, the paper reached the 100 year mark. The acids in the papers used in the past actually contribute to the decay of the paper so this paper has been breaking down to the point that it was actually crumbling when it gets moved around. At this point, I was trying to figure out what I could do about this. Could I sell this to someone or to some museum? I don't know and if I wanted to try to go through the hassle to find some entity that might be interested in such an item, the paper would probably crumble into complete dust by the time I did finally find someone or some entity that wanted it. So the only other option would be to try and preserve it on my own. Now how to do that? The only option that came to mind was to separate the individual pages and laminate them to keep them preserved. So we went to walmart and picked up a cheapo laminating machine which really is nothing more than a heater and a roller, sorta like a printer, where it takes these plastic sheets you open up and fold over the item to cover then feed the plastic sheet into the machine where it heats the plastic to seal it and harden it around the paper item in question. We grabbed a pack of laminating sheets and after getting back home, got to work. The laminator came with a few sheets but this job would surely take more than a few sheets. I started to carefully separate the newspaper page by page and after dusting off the crumbs from the large portion of paper I laid the piece in the laminator sheet. I did have to break away some excess paper from the edges that overhung out from the laminator sheet in order to ensure that the old paper would be completely covered by the plastic sheet. I started running sheets through the machine, getting them sealed and hardened up rather nicely. Now here's where cheapness comes back to bite us in the ass. The cheapest laminator from walmart was $17 and there was an upgraded model that was around $40. This model was working fine but I would have some episodes where the edge of the sheet would get hung somehow on the edge of the casing and instead of slowly feeding out, the rollers would keep pushing the plastic forward, bunching it up. The first time this happened I quickly turned the machine off but because this was a cheaper machine the manual said to hit this button that would stop the rollers then just pull the sheet out from the feed port. Unlike a more advanced machine where it would have trap doors that can be opened to access the rollers to clear jams, this thing's solution is to just snatch the paper and plastic from the back of the machine, how marvelous! So that's what I ended up having to do when this thing wanted to be stupid. That still didn't solve the problem of the crinkly plastic that now has my 100+ year old newspaper partially sealed within. I had to carefully try to re-feed the plastic through until I finally got it to feed all the way through where it started coming out. Luckily the heater helped iron out the crinkles in the plastic enough that it didn't ruin the piece. It seemed like this machine started jamming up more the more I used it. It really did start getting aggravating after a while but I had to deal with it. I especially have to deal with it for as long as I have this machine until we can get to a point where I really need to laminate stuff where it would warrant me buying a better machine. Because me having to laminate stuff will have few and far occurrences I don't see a need to buy a more expensive machine right this moment but I did get a crash course in laminating papers and do see the merit in this piece of equipment. Now the next thing is what to do with these newly laminated sheets of old newspaper. The obvious thing is to three hole punch the sheets and put them in a three ring binder so they can be viewed like a book, even though there's no order to the pages. This is where our other walmart special, a three hole punch comes in. This piece of equipment was picked up many years ago when I was printing out pages of info on preparedness and survivalism oriented material along with some DIY stuff on self sufficiency and other related topics to create a bound and printed library of information. With that I took the hole punch and started punching holes in the laminated sheets, doing two at a time since the thick plastic sheets are more than the typical paper that this thing would normally punch holes in. After punching the holes in all the laminated sheets I had to find a binder to use. Ironically the only free binder I could put my hands on was some wussy cat binder that the ole lady had left over from wherever. So screw it, I took the cat binder and put the laminated sheets within and put the binder on the shelf with all of my other printed materials and binders, which also includes scrapbooks of postcards from our travels. At least now the issue about what to do with the old newspaper has been resolved. If for some odd reason someone did come up saying they were interested in buying this old newspaper for a museum display or whatever, at least they can say that it is preserved and not crumbling further into dust. And even if that never happens, at least I can come back to this binder whenever I want to just to thumb through it to look at the pages to get a brief look to the year of 1912 and how things were done at the time. But in closing, the laminator machine is an essential piece of equipment for the homestead as it will allow you to preserve any kind of printed material for any purpose or application. The costs of these machines and the sheets to feed them with are so affordable there's no reason not to have one.
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