Recently Brew Your Own magazine did a story about the pneumatic bottle capper that I had built to cap beer bottles. A short time later, I was contacted by WineMaker Magazine asking if I’d be interested in making something similar, only this time one that was able to cap standard 750 ml champagne bottles. Of course I was up for the challenge, so I went back to the drawing board to see what I could come up with. Since I was quite happy with the air cylinder I had used on my beer bottle capper, I decided to use the same one again. It’s a 2” bore, single-acting, spring-return pneumatic cylinder. The nice thing about this particular size and model is that the threads on the end of the cylinder rod are an exact match for the threads in a standard capping bell, which means that the bell screws right on without any modification necessary. Also, the force generated by this cylinder is just right for crimping crown style caps – not too high and not to low. To show
Technique