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Vent: a guy at the paper store in Dayton told me to skip the wheat paste on my spine linings
I was picking up a roll of Japanese tissue and the guy behind the counter said my spine linings were lifting because wheat paste was too wet, and to use a thin PVA mix instead. I switched on a 300-page rebind I finished Friday and the linings sat flat with no bubbles, which he called in about 30 seconds of looking at my old work. Do you all keep a couple of adhesives on the bench for different steps, or stick with one and adjust how you mix it?
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the_miles4d ago
Man, this takes me back to my first binding class where the teacher had us mix wheat paste so thin it was basically cloudy water and I thought she was nuts. I spent a whole weekend gluing up text blocks that slid around like ice cubes and I couldn't figure out why nothing would hold. Turns out she was right for linings but dead wrong for casing in, and I wasted a lot of good paper before I got that straight. What got me was how much the weather changed things, my paste would act totally different in July versus January and nobody warned me about that. Having two jars going, one thick and one thin, saved my sanity once I stopped trying to make one batch do everything. That guy sounds like he's seen enough bad linings to spot the problem from across the room.
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burns.jenny4d ago
Ha, I used to roll my eyes at the two jar thing because it felt like extra fuss for no reason. Then I had a stretch where nothing would hold and I finally tried it, and wow, I was wrong. The weather point is so real too, my July paste and January paste might as well be two different glues and I never made peace with that until I started paying attention to it. Your mileage may vary with how thick you keep each jar, but just having both ready means you stop forcing one batch to do jobs it was never going to handle.
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