Cleaning the plucker??

[Stablecoop]

Hello all! We recently processed our meat birds and I found cleaning the plucker to be a very difficult and demoralizing task. We have a drum style plucker with the rubber fingers. It seems impossible to completely clean it, feathers get trapped especially where the fingers come into contact with the drum. Does anyone have tips on how to do this without taking fingers out of the drum? Thanks for your help!!

 

[iwltfum]

Definitely do not remove the fingers from the drum. It's a pain to get them back in. Pluckers are annoying in that way. I used to rent a plucker from a feed store when I first started out raising meat birds and the plucker would be given to me with tons of feathers in it. They obviously never cleaned it themselves and didn't have a bring-it-back-clean policy. With my plucker now, I get it as clean as I can without picking every feather out from behind every finger. There are always a couple feathers stuck in there, but I can only bring myself to spend 5 or 6 minutes cleaning the thing during the growing season. Our last butchering for the year is usually thanksgiving turkeys, so I always spend some extra time picking the feathers out individually to get it nice and clean for storing during the winter.

 

[Molpet]

Definitely do not remove the fingers from the drum. It's a pain to get them back in. Pluckers are annoying in that way. I used to rent a plucker from a feed store when I first started out raising meat birds and the plucker would be given to me with tons of feathers in it. They obviously never cleaned it themselves and didn't have a bring-it-back-clean policy. With my plucker now, I get it as clean as I can without picking every feather out from behind every finger. There are always a couple feathers stuck in there, but I can only bring myself to spend 5 or 6 minutes cleaning the thing during the growing season. Our last butchering for the year is usually thanksgiving turkeys, so I always spend some extra time picking the feathers out individually to get it nice and clean for storing during the winter.

X2

Also if you bend the finger it's easier to get the feathers out from behind it.

 

[Stablecoop]

Definitely do not remove the fingers from the drum. It's a pain to get them back in. Pluckers are annoying in that way. I used to rent a plucker from a feed store when I first started out raising meat birds and the plucker would be given to me with tons of feathers in it. They obviously never cleaned it themselves and didn't have a bring-it-back-clean policy. With my plucker now, I get it as clean as I can without picking every feather out from behind every finger. There are always a couple feathers stuck in there, but I can only bring myself to spend 5 or 6 minutes cleaning the thing during the growing season. Our last butchering for the year is usually thanksgiving turkeys, so I always spend some extra time picking the feathers out individually to get it nice and clean for storing during the winter.
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Thank you! I took your advice and did not remove the fingers . I just picked around best I could and it came out pretty good. Thanks again!