I can’t picture how this would work. Do you have a link to the video? Typically the two sides of those mop presses are angled slightly which I would think would push some apples out of it.
I used to mop floors at Safeway as a teenager and we tried to use these presses a couple times as a vice (can’t remember what exactly) but everything would just jump out of it.
I think I saw the same video , maybe they had the chopped apples in a cloth bag , I can’t remember
He put them in cheese cloth.
Look up using Harbor Freight shop presses for the purpose. It is fairly easy to make the necessary parts for a cloth and rack cider press. I did that and am reasonably happy with the results. I ended up buying a grinder to use with it.
Chuck
IF you want cider on the cheap use what I do which is a Juicer. See this link http://www.walmart.com/ip/Jack-LaLanne-Power-Juicer-Black/14968099. I know many people are going to think that’s terrible of me but I usually don’t make over 10 gallons of cider a year. It’s efficient and fast.
When I say juicer I mean the Jack-LaLanne only for apples/pears because it’s good at it but for grape juice you want something like this one http://www.amazon.com/Victorio-VKP1140-Stainless-Steel-Juicer/dp/B001FT4FH4/ref=sr_1_7?s=kitchen&ie=UTF8&qid=1443375112&sr=1-7&keywords=juicer.
They are night and day different juicers and grape seeds don’t do well in the Jack-LaLanne and apples dont do well in the Victorio because it would take all day to cook them down. The Jack-LaLanne keeps enough pulp in the juice to be a true rich cider and not an apple juice.
Thanks- for now, I think the juicer may be more in line with the quantities I am dealing with. So far, the largest batch I’ve made is enough for 2 large glasses. 
I have what I had thought was a decent juicer, but it struggles badly with apples. I’ll check out the Jack-Lalanne one. From reading about making the mash, I’m also thinking that maybe I need to do that with a blender, rather than just quartering them (what will fit in).
Thanks @scottfsmith. That was an interesting link.
Chuck
What would be the best grinder to use in order to feed the rack and cloth press made from the Harbor Freight press?
Any alternative to 5 gallon glass carboy for fermentation?
I made my own.
I do have around 150$ in it though. Had to buy the screw and I bought a 6ft piece which I wouldn’t have had to do. The welder charged money, and I even bought the Ash lumber.
The screw is exactly 2ft long so I have enough to do two more.
What Kind of production do you get from that? (How many gallons per press and how much juice per bushel?) I would love to see pictures. I will likely build something like this in a year or two and am not clear on the details of its construction.
Blueberry,
I got lazy and bought the Maximizer grinder from Pleasant Hill Grain. There are several similar grinders available. I liked this one for the handle on the crank and maybe slightly larger throat. I was planning to build one like that with a wooden cylinder spiked with stainless steel screws but life got in the way. The grinder works well even in manual mode though I migh put a motor on it someday. As to volume I can press at a time, I can easily do ten gallons of pulp, and this design can easily be expanded. I was limited by the pan size. I had a sheet of stainless steel that would make a pan 18x22" with a 1" lip. Bigger pan, bigger press boards, could easily go to 20 gal at a time. I think I was getting 10 gal pulp per bushel. Got more than 2 gal juice per bushel.
39thparallel,
Like a cheese press an apple press could effectively be a 5 gallon bucket. The long screw in the middle of the above apple press shown is used to apply pressure by tightening a plate. That plate is pressed down the more the screw is tightened. Think of it like a screw being driven in a block of wood with the head of the screw being the plate. Let me show you pictures of a sausage press because it operates using the same principles. Here is the press
I also built my own press. It’s not a hard project, this is the first substantial thing I’ve ever built and it turned out fine. The barrel is 12" x 12" and if it’s completely full when I start I get about 2.5 gallons of cider. The finer you can grind up the apples the better your yield will be.
You can see the grinder I built on the back. It had a small rotating cylinder with screws in it to crush the apples very fine but was also very slow. This year I bought a grinder. The mash is not ground up as fine but it is much faster so overall production is still better. I’ve made 40 gallons so far this year with this setup.
The press is the easy part, to buy of build. Lots of good examples here.
I tell everyone, if your going to do more than 10 gallons a year, the grinder is the key. Getting a good grind fast is what keeps cider making pleasurable. We just want to be able to dump apples in by the crate full. A motor is really nice…
Getting the cutting head right is important too, especially if you press in the basic slatted barrel. If you get too pulpy, it just oozes out, also lots of juice gets trapped in the barrel, unable to escape from the pulp,where a coarser grind leaves some open channels for juice to run through. Admittedly at the cost of lost extraction.
For our club MidFEx, we looked at various press manufacturers.
Apple Cider Press Manufacturers 1/24/14 PJD
Now we have to figure out how to motorize pressing! I heard about using water pressure and a bag to press em.
Well after two seasons of using the mop press and quisinart I’m thinking of buying one. Too much work and I think it just doesn’t apply enough pressure to get all of the juice out.
It depends on what “small” is really.
We are putting a couple of bushels thru a centrifugal juicer, and that works OK. We do it in several sessions (which match how the apples ripen and our available time). And it works OK. I think these juicers do get more juice out of the apples than a traditional press, but they are slow, doing an apple at a time. However if you add up all the time grinding and cleaning up from a traditional press, it may not be that much longer, but never having a traditional cider setup I am just guessing on that.
I suppose that we will eventually have to “upgrade” to a different setup, once more of the apple trees come into production. But until then, this is working for us.
I know this old article has been brought up http://www.motherearthnews.com/DIY/homemade-cider-press-zmaz82sozgoe . The washing machine would need to be tweaked for efficiency but it’s a great idea! This video has also been posted on here but as you can see these kids did a fairly good job https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nj9z7NbO9mk. Twenty gallons of cider an hour would be very difficult to beat with any other device. These kids were not the only ones to read the mother earth article https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00tjcmtbx4s. I like this example as well https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vbxl1JyY4Og.
Even though this is an old post, I thought I would comment. I discovered one of those Lalanne juicers in the pantry. We used to use it but discovered it’s too easy to make and drink juices and we were gaining weight from too much juice, ha ha.
Now I have too many apples in storage and they wont all keep. Some are not so pretty, also. We do drink a glass or two of juice every day, so I thought why not make some cider. I cant use a gallon at a time but a couple of quarts at once is ideal for us.
The Lalanne juicer worked very nicely. Some of the apple are dark red skin - Jonathan, Priscilla, Akane. The juice comes out a nice shade of pink. That also happens with pink flesh apple, Airlie Red Flesh. The juice is foamy and has a sediment, like cider we used to get at the local orchard 50 years ago. Stored in the fridge a few days, the flavor becomes richer and more like classic cider.
This juicer uses a shredder and centrifugal action to separate juice and fine pulp from the solids. It’s good to make a couple of quart jars of juice at a time.
