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A guy at the Ohio Book Fair showed me his sewing frame setup and I rebuilt mine that weekend
I went to the Ohio Book Fair in Columbus back in March mostly to dig through the $2 bins, but I ended up talking to a binder named Ray at a demo table for almost an hour. He was sewing a book on cords using a wooden frame he built himself out of maple for about $25 in lumber, and he let me crank the tension and feel how even it was. My setup at home was a $90 frame off a craft site that always wobbled, so I went home and copied his design with a handsaw and some 3/8 inch dowels. Took me two weekends and one messed up cut, but the difference in my sewing is night and day, no more sagging signatures in the middle of a book. If anyone wants the rough measurements I wrote them on the back of a receipt, happy to type them up. Has anyone else built their own frame, and did you go with a lying press style or something simpler?
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laura_black9d ago
Something about this lines up with a video I watched from a bookbinder in Indiana who said the same thing, that the cheap frames sold online flex under tension and warp the sewing. His fix was almost the same as yours, just thicker uprights and a cross brace at the bottom so nothing racks side to side. That cross brace part stuck with me because wobble is really two problems, the frame leaning and the frame twisting, and most store frames only fix the first one. Two weekends and one bad cut is a pretty cheap price for that kind of upgrade over the $90 one. I went with a lying press style myself but I bolted it to a board so it stays put, which is kind of a halfway version of what Ray built. What size dowels did you end up using for the uprights, and did you glue everything or leave it so it comes apart?
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