I’m all for do-it-yourself when you can. I found this great idea for a home-made cider press on the blog of the Deliberate Agrarian. It looks feasible to make and is ingenious in using an old scissors type car jack as the pressing mechanism – if you’re interested click the link.
The “inventor” is also the same guy who brought us the whizbang chicken plucker. I ordered the plans for that and we go round and round as to whether we want to butcher our own chickens. We’re getting closer after our local locker stopped doing chickens and now it’s a half-dozen Sunday drives to the nearest locker that still does chickens. I suspect that sooner or later I’ll have a whiz-bang!