The Crusher/Destemmer required a bit of MacGuivering to come up with a way to make the moving parts work and function like a commercially available one.  I decided to try using a couple of thrift store rolling pins for the rollers and cut teeth into them by running my radial arm saw across them.  They were already drilled down the center to receive a length of 1/2” threaded rod.

I laid out gears on my computer CAD program and made some mock ups out of some scrap maple.  They got screwed into the ends of the rollers.  Lock washers and nuts held them all securely in place, but if they jambed up, would allow the rods to rotate if needed. They got assembled into a simple hopper made from 3/4” plywood.   Elongating one pair of holes allows for adjusting the spacing between the rollers if the need arises.  The final gears were simply cut out of a small 1/2” thick plastic cutting board.

The Crusher needs to sit above the Destemmer.  The concept for the destemmer is to manually rake the crushed clusters over a piece of expanded sheet metal, allowing the berries to drop into the half barrel below while the stems are pulled past into a bin for disposal.  The frame was quite simple.  As a mockup, I used the sides of a 5 gallon bucket for the grapes to slide onto the screen, but the final chute was made of some scrap sheet copper I had.  I found a great broom/squeegee that fit the destemmer box perfectly, and found that the squeegee side works better than the broom side.

Powering the crusher was a bit of a challenge.  I found that my electric variable speed drill worked as well as anything else I tried.  Since the trigger couldn’t lock on at a reduced speed, I used a simple hose clamp to hold the trigger on and used a nut driver to turn the screw on the clamp to increase or decrease the speed.  The drill is plugged into a power strip with a switch for turning it off and on.  A 60 gallon barrel cut in half worked well for receiving the grapes.  When time to transfer to a primary container or to the press, I simply used a 4 quart pan from the kitchen and scooped them into the appropriate vessel.

I was able to crush and destem about 200 lbs of grapes per hour with this contraption by myself, and this would increase to about 350 lbs per hour with someone feeding the crusher while I ran the destemmer.  We did over 850 lbs this fall, with near perfect performance by the device.  Total cost to build, exclusive of the drill was about $40.