Hi all,
here's my build effort. I was considering guillotining the spine off my 5th book for scanning and went googling to see if there was a better way. After finding Daniel's instructable and this forum, it seemed a bit of work now could be a very worthwhile investment. (The guillotined books were replaceable paperback textbooks, in case anyone's horrified. Still, I totally hate doing it.) The object was to make something useable and reasonably sturdy with as little effort and expense as possible. Initial construction took about a day - that is, a Sunday, not 24 man-hours. Then, say, another day fixing up the lighting, reflections and gutter.
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It only does one page at a time, though as you can see, could probably be modified to do two. The construction is masonite and glass for the book surfaces, 17mm mdf for the sides and pine for the battens. All the joints used plastic jointing blocks screwed into the pine and bolted through the mdf. There's even some carbon fibre! hi-tech. That's two 5mm rods across the apex to add a bit of support to the glass and masonite, though it might not really be necessary. I initially used 12mm aluminium angle but found it too wide in combination with the thickness of the masonite, so it occluded some of the book text. The carbon fibre rod is just what the hobby store had that seemed suitable.
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At first I planned to use a clip-on halogen for lighting, but that had lousy colour and distribution. Then I tried a clip-on fluoro which was a lot better but too long and appeared in reflection. Then I found a straight flouro at the hardware which was the perfect size. It had great colour and distribution but shone on the rear pine battens and made them appear in the reflection. So, lastly I put in another batten to mount the flouro, screwed on some textured aluminium sheet as reflectors and gave most of the inside a coat of matt black paint. I'm pretty pleased with that.
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This is where the camera goes. (Obviously not at the moment coz I'm using it to take the photo.) It's just a hole through the batten with a 1" screw through - amazingly, the camera mounting thread is a standard size. I put a patch of vinyl on top as well because it wasn't quite snug. If I need to centre the camera on another page size, I'll drill more holes in the mdf and raise or lower the batten.
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The clips for the glass and masonite are bits of aluminium angle, drilled and bolted. That was a bit laborious and I'm sure could be done more simply. That's what I had lying around though, and it helps with another objective of making the whole thing as deconstructible as possible in the event of mods or moving.
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