For less than £20 I built my own apple press. Here’s how you can build an Apple Press for yourself.
Firstly I bought 3 metres of 6×3 softwood and sawed it into two 1 metre and two 50 cm sections. I suggest you do it slightly different and try two 90cm and two 60cm.
Then I drilled 8x 16mm holes for doweling to hold it all together.
heavyweight Coach Screws would have been equally good (or to be honest, better), but they would have added a tenner to the final cost.
My dowels were old aluminum tubes (from those cheap portable plastic greenhouses) with 15 millimetre wood dowels inserted inside them for added rigidity.
An old car jack (inverted) will act as a press. (The two logs were just there to keep things in place while I attached the jack ).
A wooden tray will sit on the bottom of the press to collect the juice and a funnel takes it down into a bucket. Therefore the whole press needs to sit up on a stand. A Black and Decker Workmate or an Ikea ‘Bekvam’ step stool is ideal, but any old thing will do.
On top of it a stacked series of muslin (or net curtain) bags will hold the apple pulp and a flat plate at the top (an old wooden chopping board) will transfer the pressure of the jack down onto the apple pulp. The tray will fill with juice very quickly, so have a hole in one corner leading to a suitably large container.