Current state of the PUR vs EVA debate

[Tradidi]

I've been reading a lot of comments on his forum about the advantages and disadvantages of PUR vs EVA glue in perfect binding. Most of those comments are quite a few years old now, and it has been suggested that modern EVA glues are almost as good as PUR and certainly good enough in 95% of situations.

I have a PUR binder (UltraBind/PfiBind 2000) and am planning on filling the empty cartridges with EVA glue instead of the standard PUR cartridges. My main reasons are: cost (about 8x cheaper to get in NZ) and easy of use (cleaning, down time, refilling, etc..).

PS: I understand a lot will depend on the quality of the EVA glue that's available. The EVA glue I am planning on using is Henkel Q3635. Anyone out there using this glue?

 

[criccidisk]

I can't speak for the Henkel product, but our shop uses an EVA glue very similar to your Henkel spec sheet called "iGlue" from Spiel in New Jersey, US. (It's probably the same thing).

It works best with an application temperature around 160 Celsius and honestly works pretty darn good for a variety of stocks. There is very little chance of it coming undone on uncoated surfaces for traditional perfect bound books, especially when proper procedures are followed such as keeping the paper grain direction parallel to the spine, notching a decent depth into the book block, and keeping the glue tank cleaned and drained after extensive idle times.

However, PUR will always win on coated surfaces. I still perfect bind books with coated stock using the above glue, but all bets are off if the coated text is thicker than 80#. You just can't trust how the end user is going to read their perfect bound book, so they will most likely stretch the binding edge past EVA's flexible range and ruin things quite quickly.