DH Made a Drill Plucker Today

[swampducks]

Sorry for the delay, but here are some of the photos of DH's new drill feather plucker. He used a 6" PVC endcap, a carriage bolt and bungee cords trimmed to fit through the holes.

It worked pretty well though the duck seemed to be molting so there were too many pin feathers. He'll try again after the molt.

He does think it will work very well on chickens since they don't have all that down to get in the way.

 

[PurpleChicken]

Ducks are much harder to pluck and many have suggested dry plucking.

Smaller fingers will help to.

 

[swampducks]

DH has tried dry plucking by hand, took him 90 minutes. Or was it 3 hours? I'll have to ask. He wants to try the drill plucker on a dry bird next.

 

[swampducks]

Well, DH has now tried drill plucking a duck that was NOT scalded first. BIG mistake. HE ended up skinning it after about 15-20 minutes using the plucker.

Next week we do the last 5 big ones, looks like they may be over their molt by then which should make things a bit easier pin feather-wise.

 

[PurpleChicken]

Quote:
I know that hunters will pluck and field dress a duck. The small pluckers with small
fingers claim to work. I have never tried them. In fact, I have never plucked a duck
so whatever I say is an absolute guess.

I'll be using my larger plucker today or tommorrow. I plan on cutting the bungees much
shorter, around 3".

I ordered real plucker fingers yesterday and hope to have them on version #3 of my
plucker by next weekend.

Thanks to you and hubby for sharing this info.

 

[pdpatch]

The one I made is like what swampducks DH made, except I removed the extra rows of fingers so I had four rows of two finger. It worked a lot better on my second attempt then the first. We used it on 3 of four turkeys, it worked on all but the larger wing and tail feathers. To clean up pin feathers I switched direction it spun, it also works better scalded then not scalded.

I also discovered it works best when the fingers rotates in the oppsite direction of the feathers. That is in the picture the finger going from top to bottom. Our fingers had about 3 inches sticking out.

We hung the Turkey's by the feet, like we would do when hand plucking and move the drill around the bird.

Tom

 

[swampducks]

Quote:
Did you pluck? Did you shorten your fingers? How did it go? And did you scaled first? I figure between all the experimenters in this thread we'll have the perfect drill plucker at the end of the month!

 

[Acre of Blessings]

Hubby and i are gonna try to make the large plucker that PC made. Hopefully it will work for us. I thought that I would try one with a washing machine motor, but a drill will have to work for now.

 

[RedStickLA]

I am jumping in here too...
After butchering and plucking 4 Delaware roos yesterday my husband has finally agreed that we need a plucker.

He is very handy so he plans on making one. I really like the whizbang chicken plucker it just seems so easy and efficient…especially after spending the day plucking chickens. He is looking at some of the table top models too but to me they look messy.

I am going to show him the pics y'all have on here of the ones made with the drills.

So our research on building a plucker has begun…

Mitzi

 

[PurpleChicken]

Quote:
Did you pluck? Did you shorten your fingers? How did it go? And did you scaled first? I figure between all the experimenters in this thread we'll have the perfect drill plucker at the end of the month!

No sorry, still haven't gotten to it. Hopefully Monday.

I have real fingers coming in on tuesday and a big processing party on sunday.