Promised Land Homestead

Building My Own Chicken Plucker

For Christmas DW bought me a book called "Anyone Can Build A Tub-Style Mechanical Chicken Plucker".  Catchy title, right?  What is a tub-style mechanical chicken plucker?  Here's a picture of one. 

It is a plastic tub with a bottom plate that spins.  You put the chickens in and the rubber fingers on the plate and sides of the tub strip the feathers right off.  Why not buy one?  Well, this particular model will run you about $2000!  Whoa.  I don't like handplucking chickens, but two grand?  You can save a substantial portion by building your own.

My FIL actually built me a chicken plucker pictured here.  It works great and strips the feathers right off those birds.  I am extremely grateful for it and love it.  There are two slight draw backs.  One is that, even with gloves on, if one of those fingers hits your finger, it hurts.  Secondly, it takes about 4-5 minutes for me to pluck a chicken with it.  That beats the 45 minutes it takes me to handpluck a chicken.  However, I have a bad back, and after about 30-45 minutes of holding that chicken up to the spinning fingers my back starts hurting.

So what does a tub-style plucker offer me?  Speed.  The plucker I'm going to build can pluck 4 chickens at a time in 15 seconds.  That's 1200 percent faster than my other plucker!!!  I could pluck 50 chickens in 12 1/2 minutes vice 4 hours with the other.  Plus, since I don't have to hold the bird to pluck it, no back pain.  It's a beautiful thing.

Here's a picture of the Whizbang Chicken Plucker (that's the inventor's name for it), and one of the inventor himself. 

I was going to take my time building it, but we've got a batch of chickens and turkeys coming due for processing, and I really don't want to hold up a 30 lb turkey for 5 minutes at a time in order to pluck it.  I've gotten the green light from DW to put the new plucker on the fast track to completion.  It will still probably take me a month or so to build, but I can't wait to get started.

I'll post pictures as I make progress, without revealing exactly how to build the thing.  I don't want the inventor to be out any money because I gave away the plans.  He's a homesteader just like us, and his book is becoming more and more popular amongst my fellow weirdos.