Herrick Kimball likes to get his chickens in the freezer as fast as he can. His home-built chicken scalder and plucker let him process 75 birds in no time. In fact, his equipment worked so well for him he wrote do-it-yourself manuals to help other people to build their own.
"I've sold more than 5,000 copies of the Anyone Can Build A Tub-Style Mechanical Chicken Plucker since I published it several years ago," says Kimball. "I have an internet discussion group with 1,600 people on it who post pictures of their pluckers and share comments about them. There are Whizbang Pluckers all over the world, from England to South America to Africa."
While the internet has helped him sell his book, it was frustration with the hand plucking of hens that drove him to build his own plucker in the first place.
"I helped a friend process some birds, and he had a mechanical plucker that worked great. It seemed like the feathers disappeared by magic," recalls Kimball.
He had to have one, which meant building his own since commercial units were selling for way too much.
"After a bit of experimenting, I had a plucker that could clean off two birds in 15 seconds with virtually no effort," he says about the birth of the Whizbang Mechanical Chicken Plucker.
It uses rubber picker fingers rotating at the center of a plastic barrel against stationary fingers mounted around the sides of the barrel. A feather discharge gap at the bottom of the tub allows the operator to simply hose away feathers as the fingers pluck them off.
Kimball's 60-page manual offers detailed instructions for how to build a plucker and where to get needed parts, such as the picker fingers, pillow block bearings, motors and even plastic barrels. It goes into detail on wiring and making and installing an idler arm. Kimball even tells where to buy a ready made plucker for those who decide not to build one.
Directions in the book cover everything from building the plucker to setting up a processing line to scald and clean the birds. Little hints are tossed in, like adding some liquid soap to the scalding water to make the feathers come off easier.
Although Kimball suggests you can use a deep fry kit for turkeys as a scalding pot, he has since designed his own scalder complete with an automatic dunker. He starts with a propane fired water heater that allows the scalding temperature to be set and maintained within four degrees of the desired temperature. The framework on wheels makes it easy to move about as needed.
It worked so well he wrote a manual about it, too, called "Anyone Can Build A Whizbang Chicken Scalder".
"A plucker is a necessity, but the scalder is really a luxury," says Kimball. "With my book, you can start out by building a very inexpensive scalder using an old water heater. The next chapter tells how to add electronic controls, and a later one tells how to make the automatic dunker."
Kimball cautions that the automatic dunker adds a lot of expense that isn't needed by most people.
"If you are doing a lot of birds, it is great to just hit a switch and dunk birds up and down," says Kimball. "When motorized, it will process up to 120 birds per hour."
Perhaps the biggest surprise for Kimball has been a growing business supplying parts for his pluckers and scalders. "I sell some of the harder to find parts from my web page" he says. "That has turned into an even better business than selling the books."