Ferrari corker troubleshooting and fixes

[jeff.k...@gmail.com]

Hi everyone,

I have gone through several Ferrari corkers.  They perform well for the first few thousand bottles then tolerances loosen up and I start getting corks with shaved-off edges and other trouble.  The exact cause of this has bugged me for years and I think I have finally figured it out.  I wanted to share with the group.

I just got a new corker.  I noticed that the compressed jaws give a nice round profile, see pic below.'

My older corker, on the other hand, has a kind of lopsided profile, see below

This lopsidedness comes about because there is a bit of play in the mechanism where I am pointing with the Sharpie.  There is no similar play in the new Ferrari.  This profile lopsidedness plays havoc when you press the cork into the bottle.  The edge of the cork along the longer dimension hits the mouth of the bottle and shears off or just makes the cork really difficult to insert.  You need a nice round profile like in the first pic. 

My solution is to add some shims.  See pic below.

These are mild steel 0.75 mm sheets I slid into place.  They take up the play and force the jaws into a round profile again.

Another modification I think might be helpful to others is attaching a plastic container to the side of the corker for easy/fast access to corks.  This saves a lot of time when you are corking hundreds/thousands of bottles.

Putting this out there for the archives!

[scott heath]

Thank you for doing this work and posting about it! If I am any indication, there are many folks who have had the same experience. 

So you found that this shim solved the shaving problem? I have the champagne corker version and I have found it occasionally needs more force to push the cork in than at other times. I have chalked this up to varying densities in the corks, as well as apparent slack in the system as you have found. I also frequently have the shaving problem.

Well done!

Scott

[jeff.k...@gmail.com]

Glad to hear it Scott.

Yes, adding the shim appears to have fixed the shaving problem, but I am going to reserve judgement.  Once I have corked a few hundred bottles I'll feel more confident.  But the theory seems sound and the fix appears to work.  By the way, it looks like the older Ferrari corkers have gone out of production.  There is a newer model (the one I just bought) that has a more robust foot and a different bottle-locking mechanism.  The jaws/compression mechanism seem identical however.

/Jeff