Last year I pressed somewhere around 1,000 pounds of apples. In the process of doing this it became painfully apparent that my apple picking far outpaced my processing ability and I needed to step things up a notch or two. I began doing this by making an apple chopper ( http://homedistiller.org/forum/viewtopi ... 50&t=62167 ) which gave me the ability to chop apples at a tremendous speed but I continued to use my little 3 gallon apple press. This little press has served me well over the years but it had now become the slowest and most difficult part of the operation. So I finally made the big decisions that I was going to build a new press.
I've looked at presses other people had built and felt fairly confident I could easily build one myself. To begin with I have quite an accumulation of 4x4s which I get for free and often use them for firewood, which is a shame, and a few 3x6 beams.. So I took a couple of these, got a rough idea of just how big I wanted this to be and set about cutting pieces to go together. I decided to notch the vertical supports to fit the horizontal pieces the place a beam over the top of them to reinforce it and hold the 4x4s in place. I wanted this thing to stand up to anything my 12 ton jack could throw at it so I doubled up the top 4x4s, the bottom one is a single 4x with the two 3x6 beams on either side of it.
So far so good, but then budget constraints came into play. Bolts don't really seem that expensive until you start needing lots of them. I wanted to use 1/2 inch but a 1/2" x 10" long carriage bolts are $2.35 each I figured I needed 14 to put this thing together and I just didn't have $32 just for the bolts. I did some calculating and figured 3/8" would work if I used a few more but still those cost $1.65 each, that would have been $23 but that was still too much. Then I realized I had a few pieces of 3/8" all-thread rod that was about the right length so I dug that out and decided that would work. I wound up buying 2 more rods and cutting them up to length at total a cost of about $12. Much better. A 25 pack of nuts was $5 and I think washers were $.13 each so that was another $2.34. Total cost for the frame about $20.
I still had some leftover oak flooring from when I redid our kitchen floor so I decided to put that to use as press plates. For the catch basin I went to Wal-Mart and looked around at what they had and settled on a big tote for, I think, $8. Now I could plan out the exact size of the plates.
The size of the plates came to 14x20 inches. I then set about cutting the oak into strips to make the plates. 2 long strips and approximately nineteen 14" strips.
Then I went and bought a new saw and started cutting the wood to make the plates
I wanted to do a total of 5 plates to begin with so that was would bring that whole thing to $25 just for screws. There had to be a cheaper way. So I looked around and found stainless steel deck screws for $15 for a box of 195. Not that much better but a little bit, so I bought that and started assembling press plates.
The only problem was these screws were a little too long.
and a double stacked set of cookie sheets under the jack.
