Experience with pneumatic champagne/belgian corker/hooders?

[risingtidebeer]

Hey all,

We're looking at increasing our cork and cage finished beer production and are considering stepping up from a floor corker and fully manual hooding. I'm wondering if anyone has any feedback on small semi-auto corkers/hooders.

Specifically I'm interested in: efficiency of operation, quality of the finished closure, and durability as compared with fully manual operations. We find that we have to replace our floor corkers after about 100 cases, for example, in order to continue to get a high quality compression and insertion. We also find that hooding operations are very variable depending on the operator.

Cheers,
Nathan

[Tubbybrew]

Hi Nathan -- I've got more experience than I care to mention w/ the floor corkers (assuming you are using the blue Ferrari champagne corker) ... it'll last quite a while as long as you grease certain parts... the problem with the corker is that a critical piece that is a metal to metal contact comes ungreased out of the box and within a 100 cases or so it wears away enough to throw it out of spec and you'll end up chewing the end of the cork up on the lip of the bottle as it is being inserted. I use to call the piece that came off the cork toenails.

spray a little white lithium grease into the leverage pin that the corking arm pivots around and work it back in forth to ensure proper coverage. I would suggest doing that every other run or so. I would go through a corker maybe once a year to 18 months if I kept maintenance up on it. And that would be with corking maybe 50 cases a week.

Cheers!
- Chris

[risingtidebeer]

Thanks Chris. that sounds *exactly* like our experience with the Ferarri. I'll take that to heart. I do think we want to move to a pneumatic option with our upcoming addition of a wild beer facility, but in the meantime we'll get on that greasing.

Prost!