On McBride's Art of Card Manipulation he explains how he prepares cards for split fan productions. The first step he does is scrape the card underneath a ruler. I have some bee cards but when I scrape them with a ruler a great deal of the red ink on the back comes off and the back becomes a lot lighter, too light in my opinion. It looks like if I scrape as much as Jeff does the back is going to be white. Is this what is supposed to happen? Does anyone else prepare cards in this way? Have bee cards just gotten cheaper or something? Any other recomendations for getting the cards ready for split fans?

Sand down the edge of your razor or just use something that doesn't have a sharp / rough edge.


The purpose of the ruler is to soften the card, there is no reason that it should be scraping off the ink, it doesn't on my bees

When I did split fans I used a wooden pencil and would both pull then cards up from pencil creating a curve and after that roll the card around the pencil then repeat the first process.

Gil