Presses versus an old washing machine

ewww.

Why not just get a plastic milk crate and an appropriate sized piece of plywood. Put the grapes in your bag, but it in the crate and then pile about 100 lbs of bricks on the piece of wood. I think that idea is from Lum Eisenman's book.

Not sure the bricks would be enough ... unless they were lead. I figure a decent screw type wine press can generate a couple of tons of force - about 40 PSI on a pressed area about 10 by 10 inches. Now, perhaps take that same milk crate and get one of those hydraulic arbor presses from Harbor Freight and you might have something. In the off-season it can serve its intended use in my garage. The worm is turning!

If you wanted to use a hydraulic jack, it'd be rather easy to set it up so that it can't leak(not that I think tha'ts a rela concern, any decent, new bottle jack probably shouldn't be leaking) into the juice. I'd use a metal plate(nothing special, 1/16" al/zinc/steel, just to give a base to seal too) between jack and what it's pressing on(Be that steel, plywood, whatever), then use some rtv silicone, or better yet, some bondo/glass(bear in mind, this comes nowhere near the actual fruit), make a slightly bowl shaped sealed surface around/encasing the jack.

Just an idea off top of my head, lots of solutions, but if you did want to use a bottle jack, no reason no to do it. Know guys who've made pin "peening" presses for knifemaking with bottle jacks, and some of them are working with things like presentation grade ironwood, etc, that would put you out a lot more money than most small-medium size batches of grapes if the wood was contaminated, and they have no worries about it.

Sadly, not a setup I ever got around to making myself, and taking a break from knifemaking.

Joel

Hi....I built a simple press for about 40 bucks this summer.I've used it 3 times so far and it seems to work just fine.I used it today for a

Yeah, but you do not need that much force. In fact, pressing more times under lower force will extract fewer harsh tannins, but give you fairly good extraction. 80% or so.

Commercial wineries have gone to horizontal presses that do not use a lot of force, but they go through many pressing cycles to extract about the same amount of juice, but far fewer harsh tannins.

Andy,

I'd like to see those pictures. Does it take up much room? Forty dollars is well within my budget!

Thanks,

DV

I tried emailing you but your address is munged or something. Yeah we gotta do what we gotta do to keep the spam bots away :=(. I saved his URL, if you email me directly I can send you the URL if jomaum does not respond. My email address is my radio callsign less the extraneous last character at abs dot net to reach me. I'm building one based loosely on his design out of of some scrap iron I have laying around. I don't want to post the URL for his pics to the entire newsgroup without his permission, but it should be okay to pass it along to you.

Also...I built it so it can be broken down for storage.....the uprights can be tilted back to load berries as well.....andy j.

Also...it's built to be broken down for storage....the uprights can be tilted back for loading the must......actually the features are endless....andy j.

Andy, Welded my press together, with a temporary basket support and using a brand new wire mesh trash can I got at Home Depot as the basket for $3.98. Looking at the construction of traditional press baskets, particularly the heavy iron staves used to surround the wood slats, I was fairly skeptical that the mesh would hold together. I put one lug's full of Cabernet Sauvignon pomace from my primary fermentation into a nylon mesh bag in the basket, and worked down on the screw after letting the free run juice drain into a bucket. The screw worked with very little effort, even when the pomace bulged around the ram. The mesh only bulged a little, and I rearranged the pomace and squeezed a couple more times. When it was worked down, I took some heavy wire (8 gauge) and wrapped it around the basket and went down again, squeezing maybe another half cup of juice out of the now hard brick of pomace. Any more and I would be squeezing juice out of the seeds, and ended up with about 11 liters of juice, not a bad yield.

Amazingly the basket is intact and usable as a wastebasket despite the abuse. I needed to get something working to do the Cab, so I still need to work out a few details. One is the basket: I made the frame big enough to easily accept a 5 gallon bucket sized basket. If I can find or figure out how to make appropriately sized staves, I might just do the oak slat thing. The ram plate is currently a bit undersized- a 6 by 6 inch half inch thick piece of steel which the screw sockets into. A circle of 3/16 inch thick steel or 3/4 inch plywood slightly smaller than the basket should work fine.

Based on the amount of effort needed to turn the ram, building the thing out of heavy gauge steel, welding everything together, and using a piece of 3/4 inch Allthread as the ram screw was massive overkill, but it will be durable at least. A press built carefully out of a good hardwood, such as oak or maple should do fine.

Welding skills would be handy to have........I have to barter to get little jobs done.Please post pix somewhere if you can....andy j.