DuraWire Combo Manual 3:1 Wire Punch and Closer

Staff Review

Tamerica Tashin Durawire Combo Double Loop Wire Binding Machine Review

Overview:

• The Tamerica Durawire Combo is a high quality 3:1 pitch twin loop wire binding machine that replaces the original Tamerica Durawire binding machine.
• This heavy duty metal binding machine is designed for small and medium sized organizations that are looking to bind their documents with wire-o, double loop, double-o or twin loop wire.
• With heavy duty metal construction and a great set of features, the Tamerica Durawire is certainly a machine to consider when choosing a wire binding system for your office.

Strengths / Features:

• The Durawire Combo boasts a heavy duty metal construction that is actually quite impressive. The entire body of the machine is made of steel including the wire closer, wire holder, binding table and punching mechanism. This should help to ensure that the Durawire will remain strong and reliable for years when used normally.
• The Wire Closer on this machine is heavy and built well. It has two heavy duty metal adjustments to ensure that your spines are closed evenly every time. The mechanism that operates the wire closer is also made of heavy duty steel and shouldn’t have problems with slipping over time.
• Unlike the original Durawire, the Durawire combo has a wire hanger on the front of the machine to make the process of adding the pages onto the wire-o spines easier. This is an important feature and the design of hanger on the Durawire-Combo is excellent. Unlike other machines that use a clamping mechanism that can deform the wires, this machine uses a series of hooks that allow the wires to keep their original shape.
• This machine has an adjustable depth of punch margin control to allow you to change the distance of the holes from the edge of the paper. It also has preset disengageable dies. These dies make this machine compatible with letter size, oversize, half letter and A4 sizes of paper.

Weaknesses / Limitations:

• The Durawire combo has a punching capacity of 15 sheets of 20lb paper. For binding a few small documents per day this should be adequate. However, higher volume users will most likely find that this punching capacity greatly reduces productivity during the binding process. Several machines are available on the market in a similar price range to this machine with larger punching capacities.
• This machine only has a couple of disengageable dies and they have to be disengaged using an allen key that is provided with the machine. Other similarly priced machines on the market have fully disengageable dies and you don’t have to use a special tool to disengage them. The fact that not all of the pins on this machine are disengageable means that it cannot be used to bind legal sized and custom length documents.
• The Durawire-Combo is a 3:1 pitch binding machine which means that it punches 3 holes per inch. It is compatible with three to one pitch wires, GBC Proclick spines and special 3:1 pitch spiral coil. However, it cannot be used to bind thicker documents using double loop wire. The largest size of wire that is compatible with this machine is 9/16″ which will hold approximately 125 sheets of 20lb paper. If you need to bind documents larger than that, this machine might not be the best choice.

Recommendation:

• The Tamerica Durawire combo is built well, has a decent set of features and really isn’t too bad of a machine for light to moderate usage. It will bind documents with wire, Proclick and 3:1 pitch coil and is great for occasionally binding small sized documents.
• However, the lack of fully disengageable dies, limited punching capacity and less than stellar appearance of this machine put it at a disadvantage compared to other machines on the market.
• In fact, the Tamerica TW3100 is actually cheaper and has more features. With that in mind, it is hard to recommend customers buy this machine over some of the other feature rich machines that are available on the market.