I finally got my chicken plucker video on You tube! The quality is kind of questionable because I ended up videoing the video off of my computer from Facebook... It distorted terribly when my Dad tried to send it to me...
My Father-in-law built this for me (with some help from my Brother-in-law). We started with the WhizBang plans and tweaked them to fit what we had available... The tub is a blue barrel, which we had plenty of laying around. The fingers are actually a cut up garden hose that was leaky, so no loss there! My FIL cut a dowel and put a peice inside each finger to help hold them in. I don't think it was necessary. A few of the dowels came out and we didn't lose a single finger. The bottom plate is the bottom of the barrel bolted onto a 1/2" piece of plywood. The base is a deck from a push lawn mower turned upside down. The feathers and water all collected in it and shot out the grass chute into a bucket. We also used the mower shaft to turn the bottom plate. My BIL welded up a frame from materials we had laying around the farm. The only thing we actually purchased was the electric motor...
This was the first chicken. We kept it in there longer than necessary, I think. The rest of them seemed to only take 10-15 seconds each. There were a few wing feathers left at the tip of the joint, and a tail feather or two, but very few if any pin feathers... So easy!!!
It worked amazingly well! We did 10 extra large chickens. Two of the braces did break their welds, so we are going to revise and fix that before we use it again. After we were done, the barrel unbolts from the base so we can take it apart really easily to clean it. The next plucking will be my two turkeys. My BIL is worried it won't be able to do them. I have all the confidence in the world in my awesome new plucker!!
My Father-in-law built this for me (with some help from my Brother-in-law). We started with the WhizBang plans and tweaked them to fit what we had available... The tub is a blue barrel, which we had plenty of laying around. The fingers are actually a cut up garden hose that was leaky, so no loss there! My FIL cut a dowel and put a peice inside each finger to help hold them in. I don't think it was necessary. A few of the dowels came out and we didn't lose a single finger. The bottom plate is the bottom of the barrel bolted onto a 1/2" piece of plywood. The base is a deck from a push lawn mower turned upside down. The feathers and water all collected in it and shot out the grass chute into a bucket. We also used the mower shaft to turn the bottom plate. My BIL welded up a frame from materials we had laying around the farm. The only thing we actually purchased was the electric motor...
This was the first chicken. We kept it in there longer than necessary, I think. The rest of them seemed to only take 10-15 seconds each. There were a few wing feathers left at the tip of the joint, and a tail feather or two, but very few if any pin feathers... So easy!!!
It worked amazingly well! We did 10 extra large chickens. Two of the braces did break their welds, so we are going to revise and fix that before we use it again. After we were done, the barrel unbolts from the base so we can take it apart really easily to clean it. The next plucking will be my two turkeys. My BIL is worried it won't be able to do them. I have all the confidence in the world in my awesome new plucker!!
