Tinkerers like us at AP geek out on smartphone factory tours and teardown content from the likes of iFixit and JerryRigEverything. Freak accidents are another rough way to discover what’s inside your pocketable glass sandwich. They happen more frequently than you'd think, often leaving the phone's innards charred from the battery’s spontaneous combustion. However, a person recently had their phone cleanly cut in two by an industrial machine.
A Redditor recently posted a picture of their coworker’s phone after it was sliced by an industrial paper cutter, also called a guillotine. In the severed phone, you can see the layers of lithium and the foil insulator inside, along with the solid aluminum of the frame, and part of the main board, too.
Most industrial paper cutters use electric motors to move a giant blade up and down on command. They can exert several hundred pounds of force — enough to slice through most objects, especially because the force isn’t distributed over a large area when the blade is sharp. To avoid dismemberment, operators usually use wooden blocks to align the paper for cutting. Most industrial shop floors have a strict no-phones policy to prevent freak accidents and distracted operation of heavy equipment.
Sometimes, though, a phone is the only flashlight in the vicinity for diagnosing problems with an industrial paper cutter. That’s exactly what happened with this person, and their handheld got chopped clean because they left it in the wrong place. Understandably, the shop floor manager wasn’t too happy either, but was surprised by the machine’s efficacy, nonetheless. Since the damage is unsalvageable but the cut is so clean, the redditor suggested encasing the phone in resin, perhaps as a reminder for work safety, or for its sheer artistic value.
It is rare to see phones chopped so cleanly because usually, a lithium-based battery combusts instantly when punctured. The redditor theorizes the blade was so swift, any electrolyte vapors which would’ve caught fire were instantly depressurized, preventing an explosion.
As for the machine, the emergency shutoff was triggered, likely by the phone's battery — but that was easy enough to reset, and the cutter was operational again shortly. However, it dulled the blade enough to make it miss the last few sheets of paper to be cut. But that’s an easy fix because industrial paper cutter blades are thick — designed to be resharpened almost every week during their long service life. Most shops have multiple blades, and just replace them to go chop-chop again.