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Figured out my text block grain was running sideways after 8 months of doing it wrong
I was cutting all my spine liners with the grain going across the width instead of along the spine, and I only caught it last Tuesday when a customer brought back a book I bound in the spring that was already cracking at the hinge. The book was a 400 page novel and the whole spine liner had split down the middle. I grabbed my straightedge and one of my scraps and sure enough, I had been running that grain the wrong way the whole time on every single book. Now I'm sitting here wondering how many other bindings from the last 8 months are gonna fail, so if anyone has a trick for telling grain direction on scraps that doesn't involve tearing them, I'd love to hear it.
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leoyoung6h ago
Wait, did you actually test the grain direction before you started cutting, or did you just assume the stack was oriented the same way every time? In my experience most paper comes with the grain running the long way on a full sheet, so if you were cutting spine liners from strips that were already cut down, the grain could have flipped without you noticing. Before I blame eight months of bindings, I would check a few scraps from different batches, because maybe it was only the last few weeks that got messed up. Take this with a grain of salt but the bend test is still the easiest one, just flex the scrap both ways and the way it bends easier is the grain direction.
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