Building a drill mounted chicken plucker....

[Morning Dove]

I had some sucess with my drill mounted plucker, but not as much as I would have liked. I think I need to work on my scalding technique. We ended up hand plucking about half of each bird.....

Dove

 

[kingmt]

Quote:
Post a pic of your plucker for us to take a look at. To scald I have my water at 150 & splash the bird in about 3 times or untill a wing feather pulls out easily. Then I dip the tail in because it gets exposed less then the rest of the bird.

Hope this helps some.

 

[kingmt]

bja105

I would still like to help you figure out what went wrong if you will contact me.

 

[Morning Dove]

Ok, I'll post a picture of it, ASAP!

 

[poultry123]

how do you use them?

 

[RWD]

People make their own and then are dissapointed it did not work as well as they thought. Mine works if you scald correctly, mount the drill right, and follow the directions, My plucker is $39.95, how much money can you save after buying 15 fingers, drilling on a drill press so the fingers are straight and seated correctly, plus 2 caps and 4"pvc for one plucker? Try one that works, before you condemn the product because a bungie cord wont work. Your not investing as much as a tub plucker, to find out it does not work as well as you thought.

 

[kingmt]

RWD

That is way to long & puts to much weight on a drill. If you had the other end supported it would probably be OK.

Poultry123

It is all about the scald. If you do the scald right then it well work very well. I sell them on eBay for $38 TYD because of all the fees. I have to pay listing, selling & PayPal fees. If I'm contacted directly I sell them for $27 TYD because I don't have as much expense in them. I only have about $6 in parts $5 in shipping + ~$2 for gas if I have to take the package in. So I profit about $14. If you want to build it yourself I have told others how. Fingers are harder to find at a decent price unless you buy in bulk & by direct. I would sell 4 of them to you for $5 plus $5 shipping if you need more I can price them to you.

All of these prices are for inside the US. I also ship all over the world but shipping is more.

 

[Beekissed]

I've seen several designs for drill pluckers and watched them in action on YouTube. I can see room for improvement on the designs I saw, one of which is to mount a plastic guard over the plucker to deflect feathers. Another is the length of the fingers and the speed of the drill...I think one could play with those and get a finer pluck than the ones I saw.

I've wondered if one can get a hand drill to the correct RPMs to dry pluck like the commercial duck/goose pluckers? Also, the videos I've seen, it looks like they would get better efficacy on their pluck if they'd just reverse their drill.

I will be building one this next month and hope to implement the changes I noted.

 

[kingmt]

Yes. Ducks work better at a slow speed when dry plucking. Scalded chicken work better at a fast speed. I actually think 3 fingers would work better but I can't ship them as cheap that way.

 

[Beekissed]

I've hand plucked the CX and it was so different from regular DP chickens. One could almost just wipe the feathers off as these birds are so young and tender. I'm wondering why ducks can be dry plucked and these young CX cannot? I know the feathers are smaller gauge on a duck but the CX are so young that the feathers come out easily dry pulled....do you think that dry plucking would tear the skin?

Anyone tried dry plucking CX with these homemade pluckers?