Has anyone tried this?

I saw this on Pinterest. I thought "Does it actually work?"
I wondered if any of you have tried this or anything similar with your cutting plates.

http://imgur.com/a/IqCTy

Hopefully that link works!

Sheri, I did this and it does work. The board still had cuts in it but it was clean and flat. The only downside was that the board actually shrank a bit. This caused it to not line up as well with the other plate and they would frequently hang up on the roller assembly instead of passing through. Basically you have nothing to lose by trying it if the plate is in bad shape anyway. After I did this I used for a while and finally broke down and bought a new set.

Another method is to scrub the board with a toothbrush under running water. Then you run the board under hot tap water and then bend it over the edge of the sink. Obviously, you are bending it opposite to the way it is bowed. I have also done this with pretty good results.

Finally, here is my tip to combat the bending of the board. This works perfectly for me. Whenever I am not using the Big Shot I put the flat board under neath the bowed one and then crank it to the middle of the board. I ALWAYS (as in every day) keep my boards this way. My Big Shot is a tad loose so I add a thin piece of card board as a shim. My board is still full of cuts but it is virtually flat from doing this.

A couple of the girls in my group tried this too and they had good luck. (Neither mentioned the board shrinking though!) Ellie's right, you have nothing to loose by trying.

I haven't tried anything like that. I tend to use the B plate as the one that gets the cuts in it and just move it around, so I am cutting near the top, middle bottom, sides, etc. I also flip it and use both sides. When it is bad and won't cut well anymore, I use a coupon at Michael's or one of the other stores and get a new set of B plates cheap. I'll have to try Ellie's idea with the hot water and bending it opposite. May try the oven idea, too.

I get so frustrated with them bowing!!! I find it hard to get the dies to lay flat and the right way on my magnetic platform. This is such a problem and I think they need to come up with a solution to this problem of bowing.... I can't buy new plates every other week. I am going to try Ellie's suggestion of the sink method and leaving them in the machine...

Really just leaving them in the machine all of the time works the best. My board is almost perfectly flat just from doing that.

I find the same thing to be, too, Ellie. Mine are flat. The very first one I ever had is bowed, but I learned as I went along. I also think that adding the pressure while the cutting edge is down helps too. That may be my imagination, though.