November 11, 2025
Description
My experience: First I've made a classic hand version of the corker, but I couldn't push some models of plastic corks through it. I started to hit it with a hammer and it broke... that's why I've made a new enforced model to be used with a hammer! For your safety, I encourage you to use a long and strong clamp or a press to push the corks, but I don't have any of these as I'm not a professional wine maker, so I had to use a hammer. This corker did not break even when it was used with a hammer. I corked 20 bottles of home wine with it and it is still as a new.
Print settings that I used: 1 mm nozzle, 0.28 mm layer height, 50mm/s. Transparent PETG, 3 mm solid walls/top/bottom for the holder and 4 mm solid walls/top/bottom for the pusher. The pusher deals with a hammer and it should have 100% infill under the outer 4 mm walls within the whole length of the model while it can use only 10-20% infill in the middle to save plastic: use tol-corker-pusher-safe (infill-override-mesh-cyl).stl as a mesh to override infill settings. Or just print it with 100% infill completely if you don't care about plastic consumption. Avoid aligned seams as they are not reliable. Cura's 20 mm scarf seam proved to be strong enough and did not break.
Diameter of the corks tested: 22.3 mm plastic corks and also natural corks of various diameters.
Diameter of the bottle necks tested: 18.5-19.0 mm.
Recommendation: if you use hard plastic corks, keep them in 70-90 degrees Celsius water within approximately 2-3 minutes until they get softer. Then insert them into the corker and push at once. Don't wait - they get colder fast and loose flexibility, so you need to push them as fast as possible, otherwise they may get stuck inside the corker. The natural corks are much easier to deal with. The ones that I used required only little force to be pushed into the bottle neck.
DO NOT USE PLA! It is fragile and breaks into many small pieces under load, it may damage your eyes! Use protection glasses if you are not sure that your plastic is strong enough.
License:
Creative Commons — Attribution — Noncommercial — Share Alike