[graham-j]

Hi,I have seen them work on chickens and the also worked well on ducks,you have to scold them first,with ducks you have to add washing up liquid to the scolding water.From what I understand they go through a lot of the plucking fingers that are expensive.
The only problem with these machines is all that scolding you loose the quality of a dry plucked bird,there is also a problem with shelf life as the skin is basically now cooked.I would say these machines and scolding are fine if you want to mass process a load of young 7 or 8 week old broilers,which you just kill,pluck,gut then sell immediately or in the freezer.
But for big cockerels and turkeys I like to dry pluck them,then hang them for a week to 10 days before gutting then selling or eating.
I think as a goose is a to money bird its all about quality and that can only be acived with dry plucking,followed by waxing.I just haven't cracked how to do it correctly or quickly yet.

Graham.

[harry]

i was told by someone who knows, you need a baby burco boiler (buy cheap at car boot etc) an X  large block or 2 of bees wax from a bee keeper.......... fill boiler up 1/2 to 2.3rds with water then the wax i think the wax floats,,, dunk the goose a few times to get a thick coat of wax cool and peel....reuse wax till to downy then filter it. i did my wax in a slow cooker then painted it on the goose it sort of worked but not easy.

[graham-j]

Hi,if you read my first post on this thread that is what I say,I have made a boiler holds 30 liters of water and floated 5kg of wax on the top.I fitted two kettle elements in the boiler as a heat source and controlled them through a PID thermal controller off a kiln linked through a solid state relay.I then set this to 80C.
I pulled out all the wing feathers by hand and then rough plucked them on a bingham dry plucker and then dipped them in the wax,but the most I could manage in a day was five geese even with all that equipment.I must be going wrong somewhere.

Graham.