The Teardown

Last week I posted about the idea for my blank bible project. You can read that here.

The Materials

First thing was to gather all my materials. Here’s a pic.

So materials list: xacto knife (Hobby Lobby), calfskin leather (Hobby Lobby), Leather Punch (Hobby Lobby), Book Headbands (Amazon), Supercloth (Amazon), Bookbinder’s Needles (Amazon), Bookbinder’s linen thread (Amazon),  Books by Hand PH Neutral PVA Adhesive (Amazon), Moleskines (Barnes & Noble), Thinline 2011 NIV Reference bible (Barnes & Noble)

Moleskine\Bible Teardown

Sometimes you have to tear something down in order to build it up bigger and better. So, in order to insert a blank Moleskine page between every two bible pages I needed to cut apart both the Moleskines and the bible.

Moleskine Teardown

Having never done this, I started with examining the hinge of the Moleskine.

Next, I cut the cover off of each Moleskine so all I had left was a group of paper.

From here you can see the signatures that make up the Moleskine. Signatures are basically the “little books” that make up the big book. They’re pages that are stacked and folded over, then all of them are sewn together to form a larger book.

Signatures aren’t only sewn, they’re also glued. First remove the bookmark ribbon by simply pulling it off. The next part is to begin SLOWLY pulling them apart. (You have to be careful so that the glue pulling doesn’t tear apart the paper.)

The other thing that needs to happen to get the signatures apart is removing the sewing. To do this, you find the middle of each signature and CAREFULLY cut the thread to free it.

Once you have one signature free, you just repeat the process until all Moleskine signatures are separated.

Now repeat that process until all Moleskines are fully apart.

Afterwards, in order to keep the paper together I re-purposed the Moleskine covers to hold the separated signatures until I began the insertion process.

Bible Teardown

For some reason, the Bible teardown made me a bit more nervous. So I started the same way. I examined the hinge of the Bible.

Next I did the same thing as with the Moleskines and cut off the cover.

Next I removed the Headbands (that striped cloth at the top and bottom of a book’s spine).

From here you can see the parts of a spine glued over the sewn spine. Mainly the paper and the super-cloth (that mesh stuff). Super-cloth is anything but “super”. 🙂

Then it was to separating all the signatures. Here’s the bible with the signatures separated and stacked.

Finally here’s all the things broken down and stuck back in their covers for safe keeping.