I had gotten a spiral binding machine a few years ago for use in my homeschooling. I absolutely loved it, and it made so many things so much easier. Being able to create my own stuff was fabulous, and I found myself using it for a lot of things not homeschool related also.I'm retired now, though, as my last child graduated this spring. I have been letting a friend with young kids (six of them, ages 5-18) use my binding machine, and borrowing it from her periodically when I need it.I'm thrilled to get a new machine and be able to gift the other to her. All of that is just to say that I'm familiar with using a spiral binding machine, and am quite pleased with this one.The arm is pretty easy to take on and off, which is fantastic, as we can put the arm on so it is more parallel to the table, and then the machine stores perfectly on our printer stand. It is quite easy to pull it off, remove and adjust the arm, and go to work. The adjustments for paper size, and how far the holes are from the back of the sheet are really easy to use. The hole collector is easy to remove and dump.The arm was pretty tough to pull for the first few times, but that got a lot smoother. I typically will print a front cover on white cardstock, and use a colored cardstock for the back. I punch those two together. I set those down separately. Then I grab about 10 sheets at a time, starting from the back of the book usually, and as I punch a set, I put it onto the back cover. When I get through all of the pages, I can flip the top cover on top, jog it into alignment, and insert the coil.The machine says a maximum of 12 pages at a time, but I tend to go for 10, as then I can use the page numbers to know that I'm not getting too many.One thing I really, really love is that there is a little guide printed on the machine itself. This gives mm, inches, and the max number of pages. It doesn't include every size out there, but it is a great general guide. For example, it tells me that a 8mm has a max of 50 sheets, and a 10mm has a max of 70 sheets. So if I happen to have a 9mm available, I am able to infer that probably has a max around 60. For the item I just bound this morning, it was 56 sheets of paper, plus the cardstock covers. I usually count those as two each, so it was a total of 60... and seeing as I don't have 9mm around, I went for 10mm.I'm planning to grab some nail polish and dot the chart to indicate the sizes I own, just to make things a little easier for me.So far, I've only bound fairly small things (57 pages being the largest), so I haven't used the automatic coiler bit. I found with my old machine that I love it for the thick stuff, but I find it faster to manually insert the coils on anything under about 3/4" (19mm). In my case, that is at least partially because I don't have an outlet near the table I usually put the binder on. If power was a bit more convenient, I might use it more often.The final step is the crimping pliers, and I usually hand that to my husband and make him do it. He makes much neater crimps than I do, no matter how many times he demonstrates that for me. It's a fair trade-off, as doing all of the dozen pages at a time punching is something he finds tedious.

Things are bit stiff at first but get easier with each use! It's a pretty solid, well weighted item and works well. Never had one before and was so excited to get this. I'm binding everything worth binding at home and at work!

This is a really convenient little machine to have. You can make your own notebooks, books, or even rebind ones that you already have if you might need it in a more convenient format. The machine is really easy to use although I would say the first few times were a little more difficult and you have to break it in so to speak. Overall great investment and definitely something I could see anyone especially teachers using.

I thought this was broken or locked when I got it but I finally got it to work! Easy to attach the lever…IMPOSSIBLE to push down in the beginning. Emailed customer support twice…no response. After reading comments on here, I tried again. Had to put the unit on the floor, put one knee on the black part and one knee on the raised part and pushed down with ALL MY MIGHT. Felt like I was going to break it but I finally got it to go all the way down. Then it got stuck going up so I really had to push up so I could slide the paper all the way in. All that to say the arm goes up and down easily now and punches great…just took a lot of effort in the beginning to get it started!

Out of the box, with only one test run under my belt, here are my thoughts.I have a Cinch that you can use for O-coil binding methods. It has a feature that this machine would benefit from: being able to pull pins.Let me explain.If you have an A4 or Letter sized project to punch, you're great. No problem. There are the appropriate number of holes that go from one side to the other. However, if you're trying to bind anything smaller than that, you're going to get one of those little half-moon cuts from a circle punching half off the paper. The Cinch allows you to pull pins to keep them from punching. People like to bind half-letter/A5 documents too, so this is a problem.They send a perforated cardboard sheet that you're supposed to punch 8 times to get oil off the punch inside. This is a smart idea. However, the punch was so stiff for me that I couldn't punch that cardboard out of the gate. It would put a few holes(think 8ish) on one side, but the other side did nothing. I tried ti on an index card and it started working after I gave it the tender care of a mother gorilla... and then it began punching. I don't recommend mistreating your machines, or anything really... but this did need some brute force to start punching. After that initial index card (a5 size!) it worked and I did the requisite punches on the cardboard sheet. But I did worry I was going to break it before it worked.The coiler is very handy. That's the only thing you need to plug the machine in to use, as far as I can tell. I appreciate that they sent special weird pliers that cut the massive stash of coils they send with the box (I don't know how many -- I didn't count them -- but I'm guessing it's 50-100 coils that are about 1 cm in diameter.) They are plastic and I would honestly recommend that you get metal coils. The problem with plastic coils is that once you clip the end, you can't bend the coil 'wire' over double to finish it and keep the pages from sliding right off the coil. There might be some method you can use to do it with plastic coils that I'm unaware of. Maybe do something cute like glue a bead on the end of the cut coil. That might be adorable.It also comes with a stack of thick plastic sheets that are covers, I think? They're like plastic sheet covers that are carrying their winter weight lol They are thicker than the ones we used for book reports back in the day, maybe the equivalant of 10mm laminate that was just laminated together? Not sure. It's thicker than you expect, but it's still not really what I consider a cover. Maybe it would be a good way to protect a cover, like Plum Planner does for their covers -- printed vinyl sheet with a clear plastic one on top to protect it.I would recommend this machine if you need or want to make journals, scrapbooks, planners, instructions, your manifesto... what ever.4 stars. I only knocked off one for that inability to pull pins on smaller than letter sized projects.