Customer Reviews

CARL 12218 Bidex Professional Rotary Trimmer, 11 x21 Base, 18 Cut

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Great trimmer. Using it for 3M Scotchlite trimming and it cuts right where you think it will. Even slices off slivers the size of a hair evenly across the entire pass.

Great Product! I use this same model at work. Easy to use... Cuts straight and true. Easy to line up! I highly reccomend this product.

This is a great product. I had seen this brand before, but for some reason got a Dahle before I got this. The Dahle could not handle the mat board I was trying to cut, and then the cutter guide broke while I was trying to unfubar the whole thing. The Carl handles everything I've thrown at it with ease, like mat board, chip board, and heavy card stock. For the money, you can't go wrong with this one, and it's $20 cheaper than the comparable Dahle.

We have owned the same machine in the 12" for many years. We use it for light duty, occasional cutting of photo paper and for fairly precise trimming. It is in a completely different class when you leave the old lever type paper cutters you will wonder why it took so long to change. Our old Carl 12" has never had the blade or cutting strip replaced and they are both performing well in our light duty use. We purchased the new 18" so we can cut Canon's 13" x 19" photo paper into usable 8" x 12" sheets. Works great as always. The wear parts are readily available at Amazon among many other places. I recommend it highly for light to medium use.

The first few cuts on photo paper leave you with sharp edges but as the cutting continues the edges become more and more ragged.
The problem is the cutting mat. A groove develops from the cutting wheel and the only solution is to replace the mat and at $15.95 that becomes pretty expensive.

I ordered this cutter for longer paper sizes. It's good for reaching those longer lengths but it tends to curl the paper and leave a bad cut. I do not use it for major projects. But good overall.

This rotary cutter drives me CRAZY. Unless I meticulously align my paper with the grid painted on the cutting surface, I get a crooked cut. With every other paper cutter I have owned, I could simply bump the paper up against the raised guide at the top or the bottom of the cutting surface and get a perfect 90 degree angle. Not so with this baby. I also find the 12" size limiting. And I don't recall any other brand of cutter becoming blunt so fast. Fiskars lost my business when they redesigned their rotary cutters making my dearly loved model obsolete. I was so frustrated not to be able to replace my old, worn-out cutting mat when everything else about it worked like a dream. But I've learned my lesson. Hello Fiskars--I'm back.

I am very pleased with this product. I use it to cut photos to size. I made a few trial cuts to make sure it lined up right ,and it worked fine.

Does just what it's supposed to do. Trims paper with ease. Beats all of the knife trimmers that I previously used. Trims heavyweight card stock for greeting cards without a problem.

I've been using guillotine-style paper trimmers for more than a decade now, and I would occasionally run into problems -- measurements weren't exact, I could only cut top to bottom, the paper would slip or become unstacked, the cutter was very heavy and could be dangerous to little fingers, and I could only cut paper up to 11" long.

With this new CARL Bidex, I found that a lot of these shortfalls are resolved. This trimmer is lightweight and much safer. The bar that the blade runs across grips the paper as you cut, plus it prevents fingerprints when cutting glossy paper. When I cut items with multiple trim marks such as business cards, I am able to cut in either direction, which is invaluable for that last half inch that I could never cut in the same direction with an ordinary guillotine trimmer. Also, I love the choices in additional blades. I've already purchased the scoring and perforating blade set, and they make my work so much easier and faster. Plus I can store three extra blades, in their boxes, in the bottom of the trimmer. The CARL Bidex was the perfect choice!