Through some research I found many scrabooking communities, since they are the main audience for at home binding. I found a lot of people asking if they should get the Bind-It-All or the Cinch, and surprisingly there was no consensus! People liked both of them a lot, and that brought me to Zutter's page.
The Bind-It-All, version 2, is what they sell new for $60, better than the price of the Cinch, but still an investment. At the time though, I was lucky enough to see that at the bottom of their page they were still selling their version 1 of the Bind-It-All. It didn't have all the features of the version 2, but for $30 I certainly couldn't complain. So on a whim, I ordered one along with some metal rings for the binding and all together it came out just under $50.
It's a very reasonably sized machine, which was one complaint about the Cinch, that it took up a lot of space. It's light and although it looks a little confusing at first, if you just follow the little instructions book that it comes with it's incredibly easy to figure out its functions.
My test projects were making little card notebooks. I used some tarot cards and notebook paper.
I used my matt cutter to cut the stacks of paper to the right size, there's probably a better way to do this!
The paper is all cut down to size!
It took me a little doing to get the holes in the right places, if you're doing less than six holes I found it a little tricky to get everything even. I also had to punch half the pages at a time, and the two cards at the same time. The Bind-It-All V1 has a fairly limited width that it can punch through, which it looks like the Cinch can accommodate more thickness with less effort pushing on the handle.
The wires are pretty cheap, so I got some cute pink ones. You just hook them through...
Put the wires in the machine, and clamp them shut! It's the most fun part for me, I like doing it, and it makes a nice professional little set of rings.
And all done! I like it a lot, it's fun to make little notebooks and I'm sure you could make much larger things too. As for usefulness? Not as useful as I thought it would be, so I'm glad I only spent $30 on this one. If you think you would like making your own spiral notebooks though it's great, and I'm sure scrabookers love it :)
