Making a Card Scoring or Creasing Jig // Adventures in Bookbinding

Card is much easier to fold if it's scored first. You might remember this from the great Chicago Screw Post album with Compensation Guard video. You can just score card with a pointy bone folder on your bench, but you can get a better result if you score over a groove. In this video, I'll show you how to make a simple card scoring jig. I made my current card scoring jig about 18 months ago. I just use materials I had at hand. But I guess I do have a lot of materials at hand, so it's not much of a limitation. This jig is straightforward to make, but you might find some tips in this video that make it easier to construct. For the back, I'm going to use some high grade green millboard. You can make the whole jig from generic grey binders board. This millboard went underwater in the flood two years ago, and I can't sell it. And so I use it whenever I get the chance. I prefer the softer grey board for the top layer to avoid hard, sharp edges on the scoring groove. I've cut the edges of the larger pieces of board straight and square in my usual way. They're my stock size of A4 oversize board. Grain direction isn't important, but these boards are long grain. Both the grey board and millboard are nominally 1.8 millimeters thick. Anything between 1.5 and 2 millimeters thick would be fine. I score a line in the center of the underlying board, where the groove will be positioned, and then cut the grey board in two along the long axis. I'll use the smaller piece of millboard to space the grey board. This gives a gap of 1.8 millimeters. I glue the first piece of grey board to the underlying green millboard, aligned with the score mark I made earlier. You might notice another score mark on the millboard. At the last moment, I realized I'd made a mistake measuring and remarked the board. Then, using the smaller piece of millboard, I position the second piece of grey board. Stippling gets a nice even coating of adhesive. Try and avoid overgluing the board, which might result in squeeze out in the groove. If you do get a bit, then it's easy enough to clean out. But make sure you do clean it out. You don't want a big glob of dry glue in the groove. I then trim off any overhanging grey board. You could use the jig just like this, but it's handy to have a backstop at right angles to the groove. On my last one, this was 20 millimeters wide, so that's what I'll use here. I cut a piece of board from the smaller piece of millboard that's 20 millimeters wide, and then cut it in half, making sure this cut is square. To glue half the backstop in place perpendicular to the groove, I insert the leftover millboard in the groove and use a square to position the backstop in place. Once the first piece is dried in place, I can use a ruler and a small piece of offcut green board to position the second half of the backstop. You could also stop here. But I found when making the guarded albums, it was handy to temporarily tape a stop in place on the scoring jig. Even using painter's tape, I found the tape would pull off the surface layer of the grey board. To stop this happening, I put some packing tape on the surface. I also added some measurement marks for convenience. The use of scoring jigs like this is not uncommon. They will be found in institutions which make a lot of card wrappers for preservation, such as libraries and archives. I've seen a version that doesn't use a groove, just a single piece of board giving an edge to score against. But I couldn't find anything written down about them or anything about the history of their use. Maybe it's just such a basic tool it's not worth recording. If you've used a scoring jig in an institutional setting, I'd love to hear about it, especially if there's some historical information about how it came to be used. Leave a comment below or send me an email. In my next video, I'm going to use this scoring jig to make some two-piece construction phase wrappers. If you've got some books you want to provide basic protection to, maybe you could make a scoring jig this week in preparation for some phase box making. Until next time, cheerio.