How to Make Flush Mount Stereo Cards

written for the stereosite by David Kuntz, USA

Here is a step-by-step guide to mak­ing flush mount stereo cards. Flush mount means cards in which the art­work extends all the way to the edge of the card itself, as shown in the photos.

For bet­ter under­stand­ing I’ve record­ed the tuto­r­i­al as a video. This video assumes you have already cre­at­ed and print­ed the art­work for both the front and back sides of your stereo card, although there is brief men­tion of some of the con­sid­er­a­tions involved in doing this. Then, it guides you through the process of:

• Cut­ting and glu­ing your pho­to to the card
• Cut­ting and glu­ing your back side art­work to the card
• Trim­ming your card to its fin­ished size

While this demon­stra­tion involves the use of a high qual­i­ty paper cut­ter and glue dis­pens­ing machine, no spe­cial­ized equip­ment is actu­al­ly required to make stereo cards. You could pro­duce them with a pair of scis­sors and a glue stick, or dou­ble-sided tape. It real­ly depends on the results you want to achieve, and how much time you’re will­ing to devote to the process. 

I would say that for cut­ting, an X‑acto knife would give sub­stan­tial­ly bet­ter results than scis­sors, and prob­a­bly rep­re­sents the entry point for cut­ting. A paper cut­ter won’t nec­es­sar­i­ly yield bet­ter results than the X‑acto knife, but it would be quite a bit faster. Sim­i­lar­ly, there are all sorts of adhe­sives and adhe­sive dis­pens­ing meth­ods. But, these all pro­duce essen­tial­ly the same results, so the only dif­fer­ences between them are in cost and ease-of-use. 

So, don’t be put off by equip­ment or tech­nol­o­gy. Mak­ing stereo cards is easy, and I hope this short video will give you the infor­ma­tion you need to get started.