The day my book press slipped and I blamed the wrong glue

Last spring I was flattening a batch of 12 covers in my garage workshop in Portland. I stacked them in the press like always, tightened it down, and walked away for 20 minutes. When I came back, the top three boards had shifted and left these ugly diagonal creases across the middle. At first I figured my PVA mix was too thin, so I switched to a thicker paste and tried again. Same result. Turns out the press platen had a tiny wobble from a loose bolt underneath, not the adhesive at all. After I tightened that bolt and added a cheap cork liner, the creases vanished completely. Has anyone else had a tool failure masquerade as a material issue? I spent a whole weekend chasing the wrong variable.

1 comments

1 Comment

ramirez.daniel3d ago

The loose bolt detail makes me think of a warping issue I dealt with on my old nipping press about two years ago. I was convinced my boards were absorbing moisture unevenly because everything looked fine on the surface. It took me three separate test batches before I noticed the bottom platen had a hairline crack that flexed when I applied pressure. Once I replaced that platen, the exact same book cloth and adhesive worked flawlessly. I think we tend to trust the tool we've owned for years more than we trust the materials we buy fresh, so we blame the new stuff first. Your cork liner idea is smart too, I ended up adding a sheet of thin rubber to mine and it solved a lot of small shifting problems I thought were just bad luck.