Akiles ACM-ER41+ Model CoilMac-ER Plus Manual Coil Punch with Electric Coil Inserter, Special 4 x 5mm Oval Holes, All 54 Disengageable Pins, Up to 20-Sheet for 20 lbs Paper or 2.6mm for Hardboard

I love the binding machine. It's easy to use and does an absolutely amazing job. Several hundred books have been bound since I got the machine without any problems whatsoever. Now that I know how easy it is to bind a book I wince at what I was giving one of the local print shops to do it for me. I genuinely think that the machine is worth the extra money over some of the other binding machines if you plan to keep using it for many years (but if you only have a few books to bind then go to a local print shop and just pay them). The only negative is that the machine is fairly heavy so moving it from one location to another (like work and home) can be a little bit of a challenge.

I researched and researched, and decided to go with this "beefier" machine with no regrets. I assumed my first few tries would be disastrous due to a learning curve, but there was none!The machine is powerful, cleans up nicely, and easy to use. Love it!

Ok

This is a great machine. Very sturdy and appears to be built well.However, it notes that it will punch 20 pages of 20 lb paper, but I struggled to get it to punch 11 sheets of 28 lb paper. Given that I had to create 50 books of 50 pages each, having to punch less sheets per punch made the process take longer. When I first started punching holes and determined that 20 lb paper was .097 mm thick and 28 lb paper was .147 mm I assumed I could punch 13 sheets of 28 lb paper as that was equivalent to 20 pages of 20 lb paper. However, although the machine would punch through that number of sheets, it felt like the arm was going to break off so I reduced my sheet count to 9-10 pages per punch and it did fine, although it took me 30% more pulls (and the related paper straightening, shifting into and out of position, etc.) to get the job done.It is very easy to turn holes on or off, which is nice when punching holes in different sized pages.The oval holes are great and really help with spinning the coil through the holes. The electric coil insertion tool worked well and saved about 10 to 15 seconds per book, which isn't much but it also reduced the number of missed holes that we encountered when we inserted coils manually.I don't know if my coils were poor quality or whether their included tool to crimp the coil ends was the problem, but I was never able to get a good crimp like you see on coil bound books from print shops. I used the TruBind brand of coil, which was low cost, but next time around I will get a better quality coil to see if they crimp better.So, why not 5 stars?The machine is very expensive. They have machines out there that cost 1/3 the price of this unit and I have to assume that they will get the job done too, although with perhaps more of an effort on pulling down the arm. So, I expected this one to be able to repeatedly punch through its max capacity of sheets without a struggle and it did not do that as well as I expected.