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?

2 comments

2 Comments

nathan_hill601mo 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.

joseph9321mo ago

Respectfully, I've got to disagree here. I've used both old 80s frames and modern setup and those old ones have way too much flex in the bars when you're doing a whole book. The tension drifts as you work through the signatures and you end up with inconsistent stitch pull from start to finish. A good modern frame with proper support beams will hold tension rock solid through the whole run, which means every signature gets the same tightness. Loose stitching for thick sections is a real thing, but that should be a deliberate choice not a side effect of equipment that can't handle the load.