Three days lost to a grain direction mistake on a text block

I spent last weekend casing in a 400 page novel and the cover came out looking wavy on the spine. Took me three days to figure out I had the grain running the wrong way on my book board. I kept checking my glue and my pressing technique, even rewatched a tutorial from a binder in Chicago. Finally a friend looked at it for two seconds and pointed it out. Has anyone else had a simple material mistake eat up way more time than it should have?

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young.kim21d ago

Laughing because I did almost the exact same thing with a batch of journals last year. Spent a whole afternoon fighting with warped covers, thought my PVA was bad, even blamed the humidity in my shop. Then I flipped a piece of board over and saw the grain was running sideways on every single sheet. Felt like such an idiot. The fix took five minutes after that. Now I check grain direction before I even cut anything, real quick habit that saves me headaches.