Double Lever Disaster

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kiljoy

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I needed to vent…

OK, after being on this site for some time now, I decided that I was going to buy a Portuguese floor corker. Up until this point, I have been using screw bottles which I ordered online. I have enough bottles to do my last batch and then plan on switching to corks.

I had planned on using my upcoming Christmas cash to get the corker. As usual, things came up and the $$ didn’t last. I figured that with my volume, the floor corker can wait and I’d go with the cheaper hand corker. So, I had been planning on stopping by the winery today to pick up a double lever corker that I know they had. As I was getting ready to leave, my wife downloaded a very nasty trojan. We spent several hours removing the bugger. I still had time to run to the store before they closed. We went there and I picked up an Italian hand corker for $35. They only had #9’s and I figured I’d wait to buy corks and bottles at a later date.

We got home and I found an old bottle with it’s synthetic cork. Like a typical man, I didn’t bother to find instructions to use this thing and inserted a cork where I thought it was supposed to go. The stupid synthetic cork (which I know I wasn’t supposed to use) got lodged in the corker. Ug! I figured that I didn’t put it in the right spot and tried to hammer it back out. The ring popped off, but I got the cork out. In the process, I broke part of some plastic ring that holds the thing together. You think I’d stop there? But no. I tried a real cork and it was great. “Oh, well, that’s how I’m supposed to use it. I guess I’ll try the synthetic one again”. Now it REALLY got lodged in there. I spent many angry minutes attempting to extract the damn thing from the corker. The now broken plastic ring kept popping off and I was getting rather angry.

I finally extracted the synthetic cork and am epoxying the little tab that broke off the corker housing. So, the moral of the story is listen to the people here and don’t use synthetics in a double lever corker!!
 
Actually, I dont even commend synthetic corks in the Portuguese floor corker cause it has a nylon Iris which is the part that compresses the corks. I have not done this but take the advice of many other wine makers when they say it leaves a crease in the cork due to the Iris not squeezing together fully and letting part of the cork stay uncompressed which then folds over when inserted leaving this crease which can let wine sneak by. I believe some people do use synthetics with this corker so maybe it is certain synthetic corks or maybe its just older corkers that have some where and tear or maybe even newer models that just arent made like they used to, just what Ive heard. I do use this Port. floor corker with Perfect agglomerate corks and it has never given me a problem ever, works perfect every time and Ive had mine for around 4 1/2 years now. Sorry to here about your troubles, I use Kaspersky Internet Suite as I had problems with Norton letting too much sh!t get by like trojans and stuff. It works way better and doesnt slow down my computer as much at all.
 
I found out later that my wife was being impatient and when Bit Defender came up with a BIG RED POPUP saying there is an attack, do you want to run this? She clicked the “Yea go ahead and infect my computer”
button. :gb

I was ready to yell at Bit Defender's people when she came clean...
 
Thats most likely why my daughters computer is down also. I cant fix it either!
 
Don't want to hijack the thread or get it off track, but get a double boot going with your windows system and an ubuntu based linux. I suggest Linux Mint, it installs all the necessary things like mp3, dvd support, etc that ubuntu doesn't do by default.

Use linux for browsing and whatever you can, and only use windows for what you can't do in linux. Haven't had a virus in a long long time, plus it's free.

http://www.linuxmint.com/
 
She was downloading mods for the Sims 3 game. It only runs in windows. A guy I work with swears by Linux. I've never had the ambition to venture into it. All the firewalls and virus software in the world apparently won't save you from an imatient wife who gets button happy...:p
 
Yeah, that's one of those windows only things. There is a way that's more advanced to combat this, but I wouldn't suggest it for those that are sane! I play a lot of windows games in linux, but it's not easy.
 
Yeah, that's one of those windows only things. There is a way that's more advanced to combat this, but I wouldn't suggest it for those that are sane! I play a lot of windows games in linux, but it's not easy.

Running widows programs on linux with Wine? :sh
 

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