Fresh from my success wrangling stainless steel for brewing, I thought I’d make up a new press tray for the cider press also from stainless steel. The starting point was one of those stainless industrial catering trays you see on hot food counters all over the place. They appear to come in sets of standard dimensions so that trays of various sizes can be fitted neatly together on the counter. I chose one just large enough to take my press boards with a little space left over. To that I added a tap, deck fitting, back nut and a connector tail for a pipe.
Just as with the brewery kit I was going to use a Q-Max cutter to make the hole for the drain, so first up I had to drill a pilot hole in one corner.
A nice long Allen key makes light work of using the cutter, and a very tidy round hole is the result.
I fitted the pipe connector to the tap using some PTFE tape to seal the threads.
All that remained was to fit the deck fitting to the tray using the back nut to hold it in place and then screw the tap onto the end of the deck fitting, again using a little PTFE tape to seal the threads.
And here it is in action. Very much neater and cleaner than its wooden predecessor.
