Look forward to hearing from other people who have more experience. I suspect the huge space they take up is a reason many are up for sale. Then again, there must be a good reason that so many were sold in the first place and bourg certaily has the reputation. I've never run one though so maybe there is a reason that these old analog horizontal tanks are so plentiful on the market. But there are so many on the market that it's tempting. The horizontal bourgs go pretty cheap right now as a collator+stitcher+folder+trimmer, but for a 24 or 30 bin horizontal bourg, that's a lot of feet of collator taking up the floorspace here as well as we have a small space.
![plockmatic booklet maker for sale plockmatic booklet maker for sale](https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/eUkAAOSwVDZaAuJJ/s-l300.jpg)
Also the trimmers for a plockmatic tower setup go for around $2000/$2500 just for the trimmer. If you need more than 10 or 12 bins (which I wouldn't mind having for those few larger jobs), the old horizontal bourgs are really tempting because it seems the second towers for tower collators almost never go up for sale and the pairs of tower collators command a really high price used due to limited supply. (a lot of static in play too I do like the fact that the plockmatic/mbm collators have 4 pickup tires per bin instead of the old-model duplos which have only one pickup wheel per bin) we run digital output on uncoated bond and with friction feed, 10 bins per booklet, we get about 8 to 10 mis-pulls per 1000 booklets which is acceptable. The need is really mainly for difficult/coated stocks. You won't find air feed collators for a limited budget - no one seems to give up the air feed towers so the price remains quite high. it appears I've become the collator-bookletmaker interface! So it takes a lot of 3-hour-shifts to add up to $5000 for an upgrade. Right now using our MBM collator and Sprint bookletmaker standalone because of the unreliable jogging sprint interface and unacceptalbe losses using it (more loss in print costs mangled than I make in 3 hours time!), I can hand feed the 1,400 booklets in under 3 hours including the time to reload the collator. I've been thinking of upgrading for a year now, but our volume is only around 1,400 booklets per month, maybe 2,000 the busiest month, and that's not been enough to really pay for an upgrade. I'm curious to hear others' input as well. Of course one complete tied together system would be nice but I don't think it would fit in my budget. If I could find a good small collator (prefer 10-12 bins), a good stitcher, and a machine to fold the whole book and trim it out I think I would be happy.
![plockmatic booklet maker for sale plockmatic booklet maker for sale](https://plockmaticgroup.com/plockmatic/wp-content/uploads/sites/1/2017/03/9245-PBM350-angle.jpg)
Also I have a very small buget for this purchase and also a small footprint is important as I am running out of room in my shop. Anyway, I really don't know what I need, but I would like to know which are good machines and which to stay away from. Was a little faster, but I should have scored the cover first. I collated the pages first, stapled them, then folded the whole book, then trimmed. The last one I did I use the same principle as a bookletmaker.
![plockmatic booklet maker for sale plockmatic booklet maker for sale](https://i.ebayimg.com/thumbs/images/g/CsEAAOSwqjBe7NTa/s-l225.jpg)
![plockmatic booklet maker for sale plockmatic booklet maker for sale](https://online.fliphtml5.com/jxeu/ygvs/files/large/1.jpg)
Normall I would fold the job, nest the pages, staple, and then trim. Even just a good collator and stitcher would be good. I have trade binders that can do them for me, but for smaller jobs I do them by hand quicker that I can drive to the TB and back. I just want to be able to do short run book jobs (up to 1000) in house with out the hand work. I am really not sure what I want or need.