Visited a bindery in Portland last week and their stitching was all wrong

I stopped into this small shop downtown Portland that does restoration work and they were using a sewing frame from the 80s with zero tension adjustment... the signatures were all loose. For a place that charges $75 for a rebind, you'd think they'd at least check their thread tension. Has anyone else seen crappy stitching at a supposed professional shop?

1 comments

1 Comment

nathan_hill607h ago

Whoa hold on, I'm gonna push back on this one. An 80s sewing frame properly set up can produce way better stitch quality than a lot of the modern automated junk they push out these days. Those old frames are built like tanks and give you way more control if you know what you're doing. Loose signatures might not even be a tension issue, could be the paper weight or the binding method they were using for that specific job. Some restorations actually need a looser stitch to let the book open flat without cracking the spine, especially with thicker sections. I've seen $200 rebinds from fancy shops that look tight and perfect but can't even lay open without popping the hinges.