Book binding

[Grumps]

There's some fine youtube video's too.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Hot melt is your friend. I would have said car body filler, but its not flexible ;-)

[Ian_m]

Could try hot glue.

One place I worked had a hot glue binder. You placed the A4/A5 sheets in a clamp, placed a measured amount of hot glue pellets in the heated trough, left to heat until a light lit (up to temp), turned a lever which lowered and pushed the spine into the glue, left for a while, lifted book up out of trough, left for a while to cool, removed the book. The spine was then covered with a self adhesive cover. Worked very well. It appeared the glue soaked into the paper a bit adding further strength.

Not all sheets could be bound as you had to leave a wide gutter (is that the term) or else print was difficult to read near the binding.

[Owain]

That's the product lifespan, not the per-use capacity :-)

Owain

[Spamlet]

I make scrap pads like that: it's easy.

We had a printing/bookbinding dept at school, and used to have boiling 'fish glue' on the go for the spines. That was commonly the way then, and it's brittleness when dry, is why old books break when you bend back the pages too much. On the other hand, it did soak in well, which is not something I would expect from the hot melt glues suggested here. The 'fail safe' was that books were always sewn together as well, so that when the glue gave up, the bundles of pages were still held to the strings on which they were assembled prior to gluing the spine and rounding it off with a hammer, to make the space for the cover boards. Modern 'hardbacks' generally just have the glue and are really fakes that fall to bits just like the paperbacks.

PVA is such an improvement of the fish glue, in flexibility and ease of use, that it is sadly rare to find a sewn book nowadays and they pretty well all fall to bits in the end.

One further suggestion, not apparently mentioned so far: When you have clamped your pages between a couple of boards with a few millimetres showing, do this with the outer ones slightly higher than the rest to retain a decent layer of adhesive while it is slowly drying and soaking in. It also helps to fan the clamped edge out a bit by 'zicking' it from side to side with your nails to encourage deeper penetration.

A 'best of both worlds' approach would be to stick your blank pages together as above, and then use one of the clamp on plastic spines to add some covers and tidy up.

S

[John Stumbles]

Maybe you could stick the pages together to make a book? ;-)

[John Stumbles]

Maybe you could use an angle grinder? :^|

[Rod]

Exactly - glad you noticed. :-)

[Dan Smithers]

PVA should be fine.

When I've bound books, I use flour and water paste, or PVA, or mix them together.

To make the paste mix flour and water in a pan, boil, stir just like making a sauce, cover, cool. IIRC use one part flour to six parts water by volume.

I really wouldn't use Copydex unless it's changed from how I remember it. It goes sticky when it warms up.

Also, make some cuts across the book-block and lay some thin string in it to give some strength between the sheets. If you're going to put a cover on, leave tails either end to join the block to the covers.

dan

[spuorgelgoog]

Have finally found what I was thinking about at the time - spring- back / clamshell binders.

available in A5 size, they say.

I have seen A4 size in university student bookshops (with or without uni crests) as they are sometimes used for binding theses and they're available at Ryman

final product has an excellent appearance and feel of a hardback book - provided you allow enough 'gutter' when printing. Although expensive, the binders are easily reusable, or if you want a more permanent finish they also take 'gold' rub-down lettering very well