Have you been raising birds for meat?
The time has come to dispatch them, but you’re dreading plucking all their feathers. I can totally empathize.
When we first started raising meat birds, we skinned them to be able to avoid the entire plucking process.
However, some people like to keep the skin intact. If you like to leave the skin on your birds, you should consider building your own plucker. It makes butchering birds easier and takes up much less time.
Here are some ideas on how you can create your own DIY chicken plucker:
1. The Washing Machine Chicken Plucker
Do you have an old washing machine which has seen better days? It’s sitting around cluttering up your space, and you’ve posted it all over social media begging someone to come get it. Yet, there it sits.
Don’t let it sit any longer. Use this video tutorial to transform the old washer into a chicken plucking machine. It’ll make your day go much smoother when processing your meat birds.
2. The Barrel Plucker
You can purchase a tool which fits on the end of your drill. It has little fingers that will pull off the feathers when the drill powers up.
However, this person took it one step further. They created a holder made from a barrel where the bird can rest while you use the drill to remove all the unwanted feathers.
3. The Homemade Chicken Plucker
Do you have a small meat bird flock? Does it seem wasteful to spend a lot of money on a commercial plucker if you could make your own?
The individual who built this homemade chicken plucker felt the same. He used many scraps from around his farm such as plywood and PVC pipe to make a chicken plucker which gets the job done for his family.
4. The $20 Chicken Plucker
This person pulled used parts from an old swamp cooler they were no longer using. They inserted the pieces pulled from this old piece of equipment into a barrel which had a wooden frame built around it.
When the motor is turned on, the chicken is tossed in, and a water hose is sprayed over the bird. As they say at the end of the video, when the bird comes out, “That’s one naked chicken!”
5. DIY Mother of All Chicken Pluckers
If you’ve done much research about chicken pluckers, you’ve probably heard of the Wiz-Bang design. This person used the design to inspire their own DIY build.
They provide a 30-minute video to show you how to use a plastic barrel and place different mechanisms inside to make one heck of a chicken plucker. This is the Cadillac of DIY chicken pluckers.
6. The Easy DIY Chicken Plucker
If you don’t want to build a barrel-style chicken plucker, you can build a smaller plucker to skip the manual labor of plucking a chicken.
Purchase the rubber fingers, attach them to your drill, and build a wooden stand to hold the mechanism. Lay the chicken on top of the stand and operate the drill. The chicken should come clean easily.
7. The Basic Chicken Plucker
This chicken plucker idea is like some of the others where you attach the rubber fingers to a drill. However, this one does have some variations to its design.
They don’t build a stand to operate the chicken plucker. Instead, the lever for the drill is pressed down with a zip tie. This allows you to hold the chicken while plucking. It also cost less money using this method with no stand.
8. Barrel Chicken Plucker with Stand
I like the barrel pluckers because they seem easy to use. You toss the chicken in and in less than one minute, it’s clean and ready to be processed.
These plans are detailed and great for anyone new to building, but what sets this barrel plucker apart from others is it sits inside a wooden stand that meets you. This not only takes the plucking out of butchering chickens, but it saves your back when you’re pulling the chickens in and out of the plucker.
9. The PVC Pipe Chicken Plucker
This plucker is a neat idea. Someone stretched their old noggin’ to come up with such a unique concept. Instead of purchasing the drill attachment, they made their own by drilling holes in a PVC pipe and attaching rubber fingers.
From there, they used wood to construct a pulley system that would rotate the makeshift plucker during the process. No drill is required for this plucker.
10. The Organized Chicken Plucker
This chicken plucker is similar to some of the other barrel pluckers because it’s made with the same design in mind.
However, what sets this one apart is they thought about where the feathers would go when they were done. There’s a space in this barrel to push the feathers out of the barrel, down a shoot, and into a designated spot. This will make clean-up much easier.
You now have 10 different DIY chicken plucker designs. It seems many people across the internet have started with the same basic idea but tweaked it to suit their own specific needs.
Whether you find your dream DIY chicken plucker or you don’t, use these ideas to inspire your own build. If you see something you like in a plucking set-up, figure out which design you can start with and add to it whatever you need for your perfect plucking station.
Good luck with harvesting your meat birds. You’ve put in the work, your birds have had a good life, and now it’s time to enjoy your hard work and take pride in your efforts.
