It is meant to hold the spine of the document in place while the user hangs pages onto the document. We found that this design is much easier to use than a lot of other machines on the market that utilize a damp style holder for the wire. Call us shallow, but we also appreciate the aesthetics of the W400. It is a sleek and stylish looking machine, built on the platform of some of the older GBC / Ibico binding units. As always, they are designed for easy use and to last a long time, and they will always look good in any office. Weaknesses:
The chief issue that we had with the W400 was with the wire closing mechanism. It works great out of the box, but we found that it might not stand up very well to heavy use. After a while we discovered that either the drive chain or the plastic gear started slipping, resulting in inaccurate or uneven closing, or in some cases we can see how the wire closer could stop working altogether. It is very possible that eventually you will need a standalone wire closer to accompany this machine.
While the W400 is great for punching letter size documents and covers that are oversized, the lack of disengageable dies makes it impossible to cleanly punch sheets that are half letter, A4, legal, or custom sized. Oddly enough, there appears to be a small compartment that looks as if the user should be able to disengage pins, but that feature appears to have been taken out of the W400. As with most to all of the 3:1 pitch binding systems out there, you will not be able to use the double Cone Barrel W400 to bind documents that exceed nine sixteenths of an inch, or roughly one hundred twenty five pages. If you think that you will need the capacity to bind larger or smaller books, there are machines on the market that punch both two to one and three to one, such as the Akiles WireMac Duo.