An “Ideal” Methodology for Manually Assembling Crosscut Shredded Documents

This paper outlines a procedure the author developed while working an “ideal” case—the reassembly of a small bag of crosscut shredded documents. The shredded pieces, or “shred” were made up of several colors of paper, with a variety of handwritten or printed entries.
The author discovered that, by making some rudimentary measurements of the shredded particles, assembling a small portion of a document, and observing how the crosscuts occurred, it was possible to predict and visualize the pattern into which the document was shredded. With this pattern, and other techniques used to sort and arrange the shredded pieces, the manual reassembly of the document was successfully completed.