A Cold Press Juicer For The Price Of A Few Trips To Jamba Juice

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Do you enjoy drinking juice but hate the cleanup after making it? Yeah, we do too. So does [Max Maker], which led to the design and birth of the $40 cold-press juicer. If you’ve been thinking about buying a juicer but the cost has been keeping you from pulling the trigger, you should definitely check it out. This build will save you some serious cash and looks relatively simple to replicate.

[Max] designed this juice press while keeping us common folk in mind who don’t have expensive tools in our humble garage or workshop. For example, to make the tray, we are shown how to perform the initial bends in the sheet of stainless steel using only some plywood and clamps. Then we’re shown how to bend the corners, and finally the ‘funnel’ part of the tray with just a few more basic tools – a bench vise, hammer, and pliers. No metal brake required!

The press is easy to use – wrap your fruit or vegetables in some cheesecloth, put it on the tray, and pump the handle of the jack. Clean-up (which has been a notorious pain-in-the-rear when it comes to commercial juicers) is quick and simple too – just rinse the tray!

Build video after the break.

Of course, if you have piles of cash you want to burn, you could always go with the polar opposite of this juicer – something like the over-priced, over-engineered Juicero.

32 thoughts on “A Cold Press Juicer For The Price Of A Few Trips To Jamba Juice

          1. At room temperature, with low contact area, and exposure time any leaching will be minimal. More importantly, if the epoxy is leaching anything harmful it won’t be rated as food grade. The National Sanitation Foundation and/or FDA should have their seal on any products that are approved for food contact.

    1. What about using a stainless steel steam table pan from a restaurant supply store? You could get one extra long, and then cut it back to form the spout. They come in a bunch of sizes and depths, and are cheap too.

    1. Dees froot eez veddy dahngeroos ahn could ahttack at ahny moment.
      *distant cackling*
      Ear we go.
      *wiiiiirrrrrrrrr bang*
      Vat dee fook?
      Dank you fer washing ahn please soobscribe.

    1. I guess it’s because some people enjoy spending their time and effort designing and building a machine. The work itself is fun, and it’s very rewarding to see that at the end it seems to work seamlessly :)

  1. Despite my firmly held belief that you need to eat the pulp of the fruit (thus I use a blender for drinkable juice), this is a well made example of hydraulic press constriction.

    1. Our bacteria process any healthy food into useful things and eventually toxic waste products given enough time. We need fibres mostly to push things along and get it out before it becomes too toxic. (I get all my medical advice from HaD, and I’m still alive!)

  2. I have a 200 year old cider press and for years I have been powering it with a 30 ton hydraulic jack. The jack puts a lot less stress on the frame as there is no torsion on it. There are no changes to the original press which is also nice. The one thing I can tell you about the low cost bottle jacks, you were asking how they made them so inexpensively. The answer is they use inexpensive guts. The normal bottle jacks you buy are not designed to be cycled more than a few hundred times if that. They start not holding pressure, than not developing pressure. We did a lot of apples, we used a modified 10HP chipper /shredder for our macerator. We can pour a 100 pound feedbag full of apples in and get 2 5 gallon buckets of mush out in under a minute, and that is roughly a press runs. Last year was a bad year for apples but the year before that we made over 100 gallons with that set up. FWIW, you can freeze cider almost indefinitely with almost no loss in quality. Getting back to the jack though, if you buy low end jacks, like from HF, if there is a store in your area, it is worth the $8 for the extended guarantee.

  3. This is a very nice project. It is true that you could make some improvements as mentioned in earlier comments but at the end of the day I see a functional machine that does what it was intended to do. So good job!!
    That being said my one suggestion would be to have the jack removable as eventhough these are very affordable they are still extremely useful for all sorts of jobs and projects around the home.
    Thanks for sharing.

  4. Cool! With a regular metal tray for ovens the metalwork step could be skipped. Press the juice into the tray. Lower down again. Remove tray and pour from tray into glasses. Though pour as you press looks nicer.

  5. These were all the rage on YouTube back in 2012, but this recent one has much better build instructions, even if it is otherwise identical. We have a large family and put up with the auger and filter mesh type machine as the batch sizes are large enough to justify the clean up hassle, but those cold press machines sure look tempting.

    Pro tip, particularly for apple pulp, use the fibre to bake muffins, or even better a cake in an electric pressure cooker, the retention of the natural apple smell and flavour is amazing. Yeah you really can bake cakes in pressure cookers. And make sure that you include the skin in the juicing process, just wash it well first, because peeling apples is foolish.

      1. Yes, honestly the results are better in some respects. I think the chemistry of the mallard reaction may work differently under higher pressures too. The cake is evenly risen , moist on the inside and yet with a very thin outer crust, and full of complex flavours. If it doesn’t work you’ve made an error and should keep trying.

  6. This isn’t really a ‘hack’, per se, since it works exactly the same way fancy expensive juice presses work (though they’re powered by a motor) or traditional fruit presses.

    That being said, making your own will probably be much less expensive (and potentially more reliable?) than commercial manufactured home juice presses, and this sounds like a fun project.

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