Thermal Binding Glue Strips for Create Your Own Covers - 40pk

The materials we’ll be using are: a wrap around cover sheet, a glue strip, and your stack of pages

For our covers, we’ll be using a custom cut sheet—for the length, every measurement after 17 inches will be the thickness of your book, to which you can measure your stack before you cut or purchase the covers.

The first thing we are going to do is crease our cover.

And I do not mean, fold it be hand. Here is a closeup of a hand folded crease—notice how it looks cracked. Now compare it to the creases made by a creaser, and you’ll see how much better this cover looks.

Okay, back to creasing—we’re going to make four creases for the best quality.  I’m using the Fastbind C400 for this demo.

The C400 has double edged guides that I already measured out to 8.5 inches on both sides. You want to make a crease at both edges, and you’ll see why.

So here you can see the final result of 4 creased lines, two on each side from each guide on the machine. Two creases works as well if you want a quicker process.

Now we’re going to fold the inner two lines to make the shape of our book.

Next take a glue strip and cut it to fit in the spine of our project we just folded together.

Place the glue strip into the center of your cover. We don’t want it going over the edges, so trim off the ends so that there is about a centimeter, or a little less, of space between the ends.

With the glue still cradled in the center, pick up the cover and insert your pages, already printed, over the glue. Then jog your pages in place, nice and even.

Now insert your project into your thermal binding machine—here you can see I am using the Pro-Bind 1000.

When it’s complete, remove your project, tamp it down again to make sure all the pages are in the glue and let it cool.

In my first book, I did not cut my glue thick enough to cover the full width of the spine in all areas—in result you can see parts of pages are still exposed where they should not be. So make sure your glue strip fits well.

It’s kind of funny, now on my second book I did not leave enough space between the glue and the edge of the covers, so the glue came out then ends, onto my machine, to which I then had to clean—which is no fun.

So with a little experimentation, now you can find out how to best create a soft cover book for each of your own projects. It’s highly recommend to run some test first to get the process down before you bind your final projects.

Welcome to MyBinding video. One of the largest costs that a library or book dealer deals with is the price of repairing or replacing ripped or damaged books. Typical costs are $6 to $8 per book, plus shipping and the book is out of circulation for quite some time. However, with ProBind tools, you can quickly, simply and cost-effectively repair your own books. Step-by-step, let’s watch just how simple that process is. First, you take one of the ProBind glue strips and cut it just a little bit shorter than the length of the book, about one-half inch on each side. Then you place that glue strip directly into the spine of the book and close it up. When the adhesive warms up, it expands so to keep the glue from spilling out of the book and into the machine, cutting it a little bit short is wise. Additionally, you can take a regular piece of paper and fold it into thirds, making a little trough. Set that down inside the ProBind 2000 the book inside the paper and that will clean up any spills that might happen. With the book in place, slide the plate close and select hard cover. At the end of a short binding cycle, tap and press down on the book block, assuring that it’s all the way into that adhesive. Then slide the plate out, remove the book and place it into the hard cover crimper. Allow the handle to spring back and hold the book there in place. And after the book has cooled, remove it from the ProBind crimper and the repair is finished. So if book repair or the constant binding and rebinding is part of your life, institution or job, you know that ProBind is a great solution for you. Here at MyBinding, we’re committed to finding you a solution. For more demos, reviews and how-tos, check out MyBinding.com.