Most of the professionally bound books that are available on the market today are bound with a binding style called perfect binding. Perfect binding involves using hot glue and a wraparound cover to permanently bind books or documents without the need for hole punching. This binding style provides an extremely professional look and feel to reports and presentations. However, professional perfect binding machines start at five thousand dollars for a desktop unit and can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars for larger units. For this reason, perfect binding has traditionally been too costly for most individuals. However, using your thermal binding machine and following a few simple steps you can now create your own perfect bound documents in just minutes.

Most people who use thermal binding machines use pre assembled covers with glue already in the spine. However, in order to use your thermal binding machine for short run perfect binding you will need to create your own cover. This involves printing a full wraparound cover for your document. If you are looking to bind a document that is 8.5? x 11? this means that you will need a printer capable of printing an 11? x 18? sheet (assuming a 1? or smaller spine). If you don't have a printer capable of printing a large format sheet such as this you might consider a half size book. Either way, printing your wraparound cover is the first step in the binding process.

The second step in binding your own perfect bound documents using your thermal binding machine is to score your cover to create a spine for your document to sit in. The easiest way to score your cover and create your spine is to use a scoring device or scoring machine. For low budget, short run applications, a rotary blade trimmer with a scoring blade such as the GBC AccuCut A425pro will work fine. For higher volume applications, a professional scoring machine such as the DocuCrease series of scoring devices may be a better option. Whatever scoring device you might choose, you need to create two clean score lines to create a spine that is sized correctly for the number of pages you are planning on binding.

The third step in creating your own perfect bound documents using your thermal binding system is to cut the glue strip to the correct size for your cover. Thermal binding glue strips are sold in 12? x 1? strips and need to be cut to the correct size for your cover. The strip should be cut to the correct width for the spine that you are binding and should be cut so that they are 1/8? short on each end to prevent glue from spilling out of the end of your document into your machine.

After you have created your cover, created your spine and cut your glue strip all that is left to do is to put the glue strip in the spine of the cover, insert the pages and bind your document. When inserting the glue strip into the spine of the cover ensure that it is laying flat and that it fills the full width of the spine. Simply place it into the spine of the book, place your pages into the cover and insert the whole document into your thermal binding machine. When the binding cycle is finished, drop the spine of your book onto the counter to ensure that the pages are settled fully into the hot glue and then allow the document to cool.

At this point, your document is fully bound. However, many individuals choose to face trim their books in order to make the binding process easier and ensure that the cover and the pages inside the book line up perfectly. This simply involves using a large paper cutter or a stack cutter (the Tamerica Guillomax is an excellent and affordable stack cutter) to cut off the ends and side of the book so that the edge of the book is flush.