Best Practices For Trimming Self-Adhesive Backing?

I've been slowly updating a collection I had put aside in the late 1980s. Starting in the mid-1990s, I'm encountering an increasing number of self-adhesive stamps. Some of them have excessive amount of self-adhesive backing on them, and do not fit the spaces in my album well. In some cases, the remaining backing is cut crookedly.

Are there best practices for trimming this backing, and for trying to achieve relatively straight lines when doing so? Perhaps this is as simple as taking an Exacto knife to these pieces, but I wanted to check to see if there are better ways to go about this.

Thoughts?

This subject has been talked about here on this forum - try the "search" function available on every page.
Having said that, you can always try your Mount-cutter?


Peter

I use my mount cutter and trim to about 1-2mm around all sides. Just make sure that you hold the stamp firmly so you don't accidently cut into it.

I haven't really mounted any of my self adhesive. They just sit in a drawer inside the large glassines provided by the post office when I purchased them. Most of what I have are either entire booklets (if you want to call them that) or in sheet form (the entire sheet or mini sheet).

For coils, I would buy enough where I could use the end stamps for postage, then isolate a single with 2mm+ backing on either side, leaving me with a strip of 9 with the plate number in the center position and also backing on either side. The backing can easily be trimmed using my mount cutter. I know the strip of 9 might be overkill, but it consistent with what I used to do when buying the fractional price stamps, e.g. 7.1c or 8.4c, where I had to buy in multiples of 10. Back then I would buy 10 with the plate number in position 5 or 6 and then use the end stamp as the single, leaving me with a strip of 9 with a centered plate number.

For the newer booklet types with stamps on front and back, I could see myself leaving a block of 4 or whatever happens to be the unique set of stamps and use up the rest on regular mail. Then I could trim what remains and mount with the backing still on the stamps. Perhaps I just use the stamps on either the back or the front and mount the rest as "booklet pane".

I do appreciate the thoughts on this. Perhaps, as PMStamp suggests, the mount cutter is a solid way to go. Thank you everyone.