Floor Corker cutting synthetic corks!

Winemaking Talk - Winemaking Forum

Help Support Winemaking Talk - Winemaking Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

trucknut

Junior Member
Joined
Oct 31, 2015
Messages
23
Reaction score
5
My trusty Portuguese floor corker has worked fine since new, till the last batch of wine. Noticed the corks were leaking after the first day on their side. I have used the same corks before without any issues.
The corks are indented along the side and the worst leakers are actually cut from top to bottom. I have never disassembled - serviced the unit and noticed the plunger is off to the side a touch. Has anyone had the same issues and discovered a successful fix?
 
I re-centered the plunger - disassembled and cleaned and lubed the unit. It is better, not cutting the cork, but still leaving a line on one side of the syn. cork. One of the compression jaws feels ruff and the likely culprit. I have company coming over tomorrow to bottle 3 batches of their wine. I will have to dig out an old second hand one, purchased at a garage sale, hopefully it is in better shape.Thanks for your response!
 
Knock the rough edge down with some very fine sandpaper.
 
After working on cleaning both corkers and centering the plunger on the one causing the cutting & deep grooving, I think the off set plunger was more of an issue. The second (cleaned) corker's plunger is off centre and makes a deeper groove in the synthetic cork, but no cuts. It seems like it takes less effort to cork the bottles with a centered plunger, wish I had fixed this sooner.
The above is based on visual from corking, then pulling and re-corking many times on full bottles. As for synthetic corked wine bottle leaks, the bottles are now spending more time vertical before they are stored on the wine racks.
Once the bottles are racked, I can update the results - hopefully positive.
 

Latest posts

Back
Top