The photos above are of Salatin's thirty inch (diameter) commercial stainless steel picker.  It cleans four (previously scalded) four pound broilers at a time and does it in about fifteen seconds (if I remember correctly).  Scalded birds are placed into the tub and then the motor is switched on.  The operator watches the birds while spraying them with water, and switches the machine off when they appear clean of feathers.  The bottom disk plate is reinforced with a one inch band edge (welded flush with the edge) under the disk.  The disk is directly driven by an electric geared motor mounted under its center.  The spray of water helps lubricate the process and clean the birds.  Feathers fall straight down and must be shoveled out from under the stand every hundred birds or so.  The disk runs within the tub and has a dense horizontal row of fingers located just a finger's length above the one inch (maybe 1 1/8") space around the disk.

Pickers like this cost over three thousand dollars so folks are interested in building their own.  Some have used plastic barrels.  There are several problems to be solved when using polyethylene.  First and foremost, be sure to use a barrel which never contained any dangerous substance.  Some solvents are retained in plastic.  Second, the barrel plastic is thicker than the stainless steel for which standard picker fingers were designed.  This forces one to modify the fingers or the barrel (either is a tedious operation at best).  Third, Plastic barrels may not hold their shape very well once they have had both their tops and bottoms removed, so some sort of external superstructure is needed. Fourth, soft polyethelene does not clean up as well as stainless steel!

Above:  Jako plucker info at: http://www.jakoinc.com/plucker.htm
This one looks to have very few fingers in the tub.  Anyone know how well it works?
The gear reduction drive used in Salatins picker must be a straight line version similar to this angled one.

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The three photos above are of a picker made from a plastic barrel.  If memory serves me, it was made and is sold by Karl Alexander from Texas.  The pretty woman sitting beside the picker is Timothy Shell's mother.  I have no additional information on this picker.  It has a feather exhaust shoot on one side.  I do not know how well this works, or if the shoot clogs with feathers.  Notice the nifty circumferencial water spray system mounted atop the tub with wire ties.  Do you suppose the spray might be controlled by a solenoid type valve to squirt water only when the motor runs?

I have had correspondence with Herrick Kimball about his plastic barrel picker.  Herrick had a problem with wings and legs getting caught in the feather discharge crack in his first design, but fixed the problem by dropping his disk to just below the edge of the drum and then adding a splash guard.  I hope we can get pictures and drawings of Herrick's machine.  Make that "machines"...Herrick is building another one.

My own picker is a functional copy of Salatin's.  The tub drive assembly, shown below, has a chain sprocket to be bolted to the picker disk (the sprocket was an off the shelf item which was cheaper than having something machined.  We later decided to use a much smaller sprocket welded to a steel disk into which we cut inch and a quarter holes with the plasma cutter to provide clearance for the fingers near the disk's center).  The sprocket is keyed to the one inch shaft.  The top bearing is on the 3/4" section of the shaft (in this photo it has slipped down...in use the one inch section will bear down upon this bearing), as is the 12 inch sheave.  Below this the shaft steps down to 5/8" to allow the lower bearing to share the down thrust with the top bearing.  Two bearing support plates are required to mount this assembly.  The 6 to 1 reduction (using a 2" sheave on the motor) is going to run the disk at about 290 rpm.  I hope this is not too fast, as larger sheaves are costly...but then so are torn up birds!  (I just remembered a source for large sheaves:  Old furnace blower squirrel cage fans often are scrapped with the sheaves attached).

Works pretty well. One wing got broken, out of forty-four birds, in its initial runs. Three or four birds showed slight scratches for which we have not yet found cause. (Other bird's toenails or beaks (while tumbling in the tub) are prime suspects). The broken wing may have been in the first run which only contained two chickens. It works best with a full load of four broilers. I may raise the bottom plate another quarter inch to insure slight interference between the outer ring of fingers on the bottom disk with the main row on the tub. It had no trouble starting with four birds in the drum. I'm using 1/2 hp motor on a 120 volt circuit (100 ft of 10 awg).  Feathers were all gone in fifteen to twenty seconds. I was able to scald two birds simultaneously in my old sterilizer, and so was able to get all four birds scalded within a minute of each other by killing two, putting them aside and killing two more before scalding the first two. By the time the first ones were scalded the last two were bled out and ready to scald. I had anticipated some problem in timing here, but none developed.

One item not very elegantly addressed in my design is proper belt tension. Running this thing with a wet belt on a 1.75" sheave requires no more than 1/2" deflection at the belt's midpoint, as is usual for all the small belt drives I am familiar with. I did not provide any pry point to push the motor away from the disk and had to place a board against the tub to spread the load of my pry bar. If things stay in good adjustment I'll have no problem, but if not, it may become a pain. Everything is in good alignment, so should be stable.  We missed the center of the disk by about an eighth of an inch so there is some runout, but I don't think it is going to cause any trouble since we have two bearings supporting the load. If it ever gives trouble, I could have another shaft made a bit longer and increase the distance between the bearings.

During the third batch, wet belt slippage became a problem. Fortunately this was the end of the season and so I have the winter to fix it.  I think the fix will be a guard to keep water off, but a chain drive to replace the belt set-up may be a better answer.  Chains need to be kept lubricated, but since the actual run time is rather low, it may be that oiling between uses (as with a bicycle chain) would be adequate. Conversion to chain drive would cost thirty to fifty dollars. A spray guard should cost almost nothing.

2002 Follow-up: I made a simple sheet metal shield which keeps most of the water off the belt and which works perfectly. No more slipping and now the machine collects feathers more compactly than before. I am no longer contemplating a chain drive.

I discovered another benefit to the belt drive. I had a chicken leg get caught in the discharge crack. The disk stalled. A chain driven disk would have cut that bird, but the leg forced the belt to slip and the bird was saved.

The bill from the machine shop came, so the total cost of the machine is now known. The total was about twelve hundred dollars , not counting my time, (which is about a third to a quarter the cost of the advertised ones). If I do another one it will be with time as my ally so that I can maybe find a used motor and some other bits and pieces from salvage thus reducing the cost.

Materials and labor        $800
1/2 hp farm duty motor     110
200 fingers                        170
Electrical                           30
Drive train & bearings     100

Now that I have made one, I can make another just like it.
If you are interested in one, let me know:  e-mail