Apple pickers recycled from cider containers.

[marsbard]

Hello ishers

With apple harvest fast approaching I thought I'd let you know about some ugly but functional recycling I've done. It's all quite appropriate recycling too, since I am hoping to collect urban apples to make cider from - see City Cider.

Anyway the appropriateness of the recycling is that I am using old cider containers to pick apples to make the cider with. Nice, huh?

The first design of apple picker is designed to pick one apple at a time, by grasping the stalk in the cutter and pulling downwards.

But on my very first guerilla harvest I found crab apples and found that it was a very different experience picking them than it was picking larger apples. Since the crab apples were small oval things they sat in big bunches - on the lower branches I could pick about 20 or so off in two hands. Using the cutter of the above design meant I had to dig in more and pull too hard which inevitably led to some apples flying off out of sight.

So I've designed, but not yet tested, a second apple picker recycled from a cider container a new picker for smaller apples like crabs - I'm hoping this is going to do the trick with those clusters of small apples; I'm pretty sure it will.

[frozenthunderbolt]

Very cool! I'm impressed and may have to emmulate you - would be good for my plum trees too methinks

[marsbard]

Thanks for the kind words. Glad you liked it. Did you see the design that influenced it, referenced from the first post? That was designed to pick plums.

http://marcsala.blogspot.com/2009/07/di ... ycled.html