I make a lot of wine, have a big #40 ratchet press for squeezing fruit. It holds about 20 gallons at a time and can develop intense pressure on the fruit inside. Its a beautiful piece of old school italian craftsmanship. All nice oak and steel. Well, last night I got around to pressing a bunch of fermented apple pulp that I want to make cider or brandy with. I know most folks press the juice before fermenting, but I didn't, I fermented first. I wanted to see how it would work and it worked fine, except it still had to be pressed to get the juice off the pulp. So, I set out lining the basket of the press with a sheet and filled it up. You have to have the fabric to hold the pulp in the press, it'll just flow out without it. So, everything is going great. I'm turning the ratchet and the big oak blocks are pushing down on the cotton wrapped apple pulp and the pressure is building up... click click click... I love the sound of the press as its working... Juice is flowing nice and clean, no pulp, just tasty hard cider flowing into the big pot under the press. Then, all of the sudden I hear this wet squishy sound... sort of like the sound you hear in the morning after eating a bad batch of oysters... I look and there is a little rip in the fabric and some pulp has squeezed out... no big deal... its small, and quit leaking right away... I keep going... click click click then I hear a big wet squishy sound. on my side of the press...high pressure apple pulp came shooting out of the rip like it was a fire hose.
I was directly in the path of the airborne apple mush and it coated me from the knees to the top of my head. in my eyes, mouth, nose... all over the garage door behind me. You could actually make out my silhouette on the door outlined in apple mush... 
I'm standing there sputtering and spitting and blinking trying to see what happened. yeah, good times... So I guess the lesson is to use sturdy fabric if your ever pressing apple pulp... In the end there was about 2 gallons of mush that blew out at me, I got 18 gallons of juice from the 30 gallons of crushed apples. Probably could have gotten more, but that sort of took my motivation down a few notches...
ya'll be careful out there