How Do You Deal With Album Bulge?

As I build my Russia collection on Scott pages using Hawid mounts the center section gets a progressively larger "beer gut" because of the added mount and stamp thickness. I used a large enough binder that the bulge will not have a structural impact but placing new mounts is becoming a bit problematic because of the increasing curvature.

Is there something available to help remedy this situation? I thought that I saw some sort of strips somewhere that are applied on the pages punched side to help even it all out but I cannot find such a thing now.

Solutions that do not involve heavy machinery or caustic chemicals are very much welcomed.

I always just get more binders, I find that over-stuffing binders will result in damage not only to the binder itself but will also 'put the squeeze' on mint stamps. Once a binder starts becoming 'V' shaped it is time to reduce the number of pages in it.
Don

Schaubek and Lighthouse binders come with punched cardboard spacing strips that are inserted every so often, although they're very difficult to use with springback binders. You can make these yourself. Otherwise, narrower or less crowded binders in tandem with the strips will help.

The easyest solution is to use more binders .

You can also make your own spacer strips .You will need a cutting board and a hole puncher . Get the hole puncher that you can adjust where the holes will be {I have two different punchers ,one for a three ring binder,the other is adjusted to the Scott Internationals }

Start off with a thicker sheet of cardboard and punch your holes . Then use the the cutting board to slice the end with the holes, 1 1/2 inches wide . Punch the sheet again and the slice that to 1 1/2 inch ......repeat about 100 times ......mine are more like 2 inches wide but that may not work for some .

Roger: there have been some commercial, cardboard, filler strips on the market. Scott has made strips that fit the Scott Specialized (meaning with oblong holes) and a Hingeless album. Product number is ACC 105. Width is 1 1/2 cm and thickness is 1/10 cm. I don't know if Scott still makes these. You'll have to check the Amos catalog. I can use these for my International Binders, but have to enlarge the holes to fit the round posts. If Amos no longer carries them, you can check the after market. I got a package in a box of supplies from an auction couple years ago at the Rocky Mountain Philatelic Library.

Harco in Chicago; which may no longer be in business; made page reinforcement strips to reinforce the hole punches in a variety of albums. Harco also made filler strips for the Scott International albums, and I have a box of 24 of those, most in use.

Every cardboard spacer that I have tested has been acidic so I removed them all from all my albums. They may have 'archival' ones (I would expect them to be quite pricey if they do) but I would recommend testing them to be sure.
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Don

My experience has been that using spacers means you need to reduce the number of pages in the album anyway. Spacers take up space that would otherwise be used by album pages. Spacers are simply meant to provide some relief to having pages pressed tightly together in full albums. If your albums begin to bulge, then you will need to expand into another binder.

In the past year I've purchased several used Harris Citation albums. A couple of those, which came from the same source, had these wooden spaces, made by the previous or original owner:



They are 12" long (the vertical dimension of a Harris album page), 1/2" wide, 3/16" thick.

Spacers aren't simply designed to prevent pages pressing together - they also help albums, particularly springbacks, to lie flat when open.

Agree.
Poland in point, started at 1 binder, now up to 5.

More binders will be needed if you use spacers?

Jack Kelley

It would make sense to use more binders and break Russia down into various binders such as : The imperial period ,the revolution period, WWII period , the USSR years {maybe two binders } and the Russian Federation era .

I used to use homemade thin cardboard spacers. Thin, like cardstock, like that in a manila folder. I also split them up within the album as much as possible - rather than a bunch near the beginning and end of the album, I would slip one (remember, they are thin, so there are many) in between every 5 or 10 pages. To me, it just made it look neater, plus I think it made them function better.

The outer part of the pages will droop. If you have the 'root' of the page spaced with spacers, and the middle of the pages are 'spaced' with stamps/mounts (the source of the whole problem), what do you do about the outer part of the pages? I have no solution for that. It was at that point that I tried to think out-of-the-box. I concluded, then, as the others here, that the best solution was multiple smaller binders.

As a fat man in his 50's, with a set of fat Internationals (probably in their 50's), I can attest that nobody particularly likes the bulging midsection. But sometimes we just gotta live with what we have.

I see album spacers all the time when demolishing old albums.

I doubt that there any commercially produced ones any more, as standalone items, so I guess you have to make your own.

As well as making your albums look nicer, they also seem to help them stand up better to prolonged use.

Thanks to all for the valuable input. Your comments got me to searching around and I found that scrapbookers have similar issues and spacers are available and common. You can still find cardboard spacers punched for three rings but it seems as if production has stopped and what is left is being sold off. Interestingly enough I found that Palo sells spacers made of foam that are punched for their 5 ring Premium binders. Now I have lots of options it seems. I really want to keep it to one binder for now if possible. It is a 3 inch binder with 150 pages and has lots of room left. As I said the "hump" is increasingly making it difficult to work with because the curvature makes it a chore to accurately place the mounts in strips. As we all know you only get one shot to place them correctly.

If you use a dab of Prittstick inside of water, you get multiple chances.