to buy or not to buy (ultrasonic record cleaner)

@whart2 thank you for the reply.  Very nice cleaning setup, I need to do some basement remodeling to accommodate something like this.  For now my US lives on a borrowed table whilst I do work on either side.  Gotta pay the bills of course.  I certainly will plan to do some better visual and preclean before my next batch of US.  Great tips, thank you.  The Monk machine is very interesting, I had not seen nor heard of one of those before.

’Twas the original "automatic" record cleaning machine borne out of Percy Wilson’s papers on vinyl record contamination. There was a test mule, photograph of same floating around on the web somewhere, and Monks was the one to commercialize it. I saw my first one circa early '70s at the high end salon in Pittsburgh, run by the debonaire Tasso Spanos (lovely guy with ears and a real sense of the high end back the day). Tasso was one of the few I knew who had one-- they were really aimed at libraries, radio stations, and in the UK, facilities that would offer record cleaning as a service.
Tasso’s old machine showed up on E-Bay or Audiogon several years ago as a rusted out hulk.
When Monks the Elder died, the company became dormant, though there were still folks out there servicing them. Monks the Younger rebooted the company a decade or more ago, and this is one of the newer models-- finish may be a little nicer than the early ones, but the unit is in many respect the same British engineering- quirky, but it gets the job done and I like it as an artifact. (The pump actuator is from a Mini with a windshield wiper icon-- I don’t use the fluid brush head dispenser because I use various fluids and a pure water rinse). The machine is still made as far as I know, although Monks recently introduced a line that doesn’t rely on the thread buffer that was part of the design of these-- I have not seen or played with these newer ones, which I gather are priced at a few grand as opposed to several few grands. It’s a keeper.

Yes the Monks RCM are back and now a threadless design that cost $1000. The original Monks machines are still being made but have been converted using the same threadless design as well, from what I've been told. Easy to use and very quiet.

My best friend has one. He is very pleased with it.

@lukaske has what? A Monks machine? An US machine? Which one?