Hydraulic drive paper cutters are great for high-volume print finishing (I used several in print production for about two years), but I’d be wary of them for this use case:

- Waste is high. To trim off a spine, you likely have to take more of the margin than you’d like (if you trim too close to the edge of a glued spine, the risk is higher that you may bludgeon the stack of pages under pressure instead of cutting it). Not great for double page spreads or Computer Shopper’s anaemic margins.

- Failure rate is non-zero. If you’re cutting a fresh print run, no big deal, you can reprint if you screw up. If you’re cutting rare magazines, you probably don’t want to lose many to slippage or mis-cuts.

- The blade needs regular sharpening, and it’s not something you can easily do in a home workshop, or that you probably want to do (huge heavy razor blades turn out to be quite dangerous).

What _might_ help Jason more is a “thermal binding machine”, designed to bind or debind a glued spine. He could (in theory) leave each mag in the debinder for a set time to heat the glue, then pry the pages free. Not a huge improvement over a hairdryer, but at least more hands-free, especially if people could donate or loan multiple machines.