Introduction:
I am a self-proclaimed expert on the Red Emily bottle capper. I shattered one of the plastic linkage components on my Red Emily, therefore leaving the rest of the capper useless. Or was it?
Opinion:
The bell on the red emily plastic cappers is the least likely component to show signs of wear. you're going to stretch, crack or shatter one of the plastic pieces long before. If the dome/bell metal piece has scratches on it, then that's a different problem, and can impose too much friction on the cap to form the caps into the correctly clamped shape and be able to easily remove the tool from the formed cap.
Usually if you have problems with the bell sticking onto the cap, its because you haven't pushed the bell down far enough to avoid the elastic spring-back of the cap material interfering with the bell geometry.
Hypothesis:
The source of bottle sealing issues comes with the bogus method of using an overly complex linkage (Red Emily Capper) to clamp extremely varying dimensions on different bottles. For example I had a hell of a time sealing Corona and Heineken bottles (not my favorites, just bottles I was able to get for free) but when I switched to a standing capper (Super Agata, highly recommended... just try to use same height bottles for an entire batch, and place a magazine as a shim under the bottle as needed to get a full crimp if its an awkward height between two settings)
Story Time:
Having 5 gallons of beer to rescue and knowing that my neighbor had an antique cast iron soda capper in his basement as part of his decoration theme,
I borrowed the $5 antique soda capper (cast iron, rack & pinion with the handle connected to the pinion and the shaft that moved up and down with the capping bell was the rack) with some bogus sized capping dome on it. One could easily cut off the bogus dome, turn it down on a lathe, and tap threads to match emily's dome, but I just used a 2x4 as a shim surface to hold the bottle at the right height, placed emily's bell atop the bottle & cap and pulled the lever. Tricky to keep the bell from tilting to one side or another and squishing / crimping the cap with your bare hand, but when the beer had conditioned, I had less leaks and better seals on my bottles (of every shape and size) than when I used emily's dome with the red emily capper. This is a great experiment to show that using the same dome in two different setups produces extremely varied results. The thing with different bottles is they all have slightly different dimensions from the lip diameter to the height difference between the top of the lip and the bottom of the neck ridge the red emily clamps to, as well as the geometry of the neck ridge, which can further determine the clamp distance, which will greatly affect the clamping forces imposed on the cap, the stability of the capper to maintain a vertical axial displacement of the bell (in reference to the bottle).
Disclaimer:
If you are really cheap, you can make the Red Emily work just fine, but you need to find out which bottles and which caps work together, because they are slightly different and it can make a huge difference when your clamping procedures aren't as consistent from bottle to bottle. If you are really lazy like me or just want better sealing, go with a standing capper and make life easy.
Summary:
Sealing problems don't typically come from the type of caps, bottles, or wear on your forming bell but rather from your clamping technique. If you don't want to pony up the $37 at your local homebrew store for a super agata, then live with sporadic dud bottles. It's worth 10x the red emily capper in my opinion (until I break one, just wait).
Hey John, when was the last time you've been up to winter carnival?
