A HOMEMADE CHEESE PRESS
Building a home cheese factory for $15, including instructions, pictures.
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Keith Bellinger
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COUNTRY SKILLS
Turn $15 and some elbow grease into a home cheese
factory.
BY keith Bellinger
I love homemade cheese and find the majority of
store-bought varieties lacking in many respects. However,
mass-manufactured cheese presses that remove the
supermarket middleman can run you up to $100, taking much
of the fun (and all of the cost savings) out of it. I
happened upon a very simple design a few years ago, which I
put together for nothing. (If you have to buy the parts I
had on hand, they will run you about $15.) Our source of
pure milk is Daisy Mae, a holstein-jersey mix I received
six years ago as partial payment for some carpentry work.
The first thing I did was to scrounge through my boxes and
coffee cans for long bolts with nuts; these determine the
height of the project. I came up with two bolts, 12" long
with wing nuts, and a slightly longer section of 5/8"
threaded rod with a nut. I did a little more digging and
found a section of #4 threaded rod with a nut. I did yet
more digging and found a 4" PVC pipe that I cut to 9" long.
For the base I used a scrap of 3/4" plywood, 7 1/2" x 8
1/2" with the corners cut off, sort of an elongated
hexagon. To this I added an X-brace underneath for support,
and cemented plastic laminate to the top. I tacked a wooden
molding around the perimeter to hide the edge of the
plywood, but I've since found that that's not entirely
necessary. You could even use the cutout section of
countertop from a kitchen sink and save time.
The press screw nut is encased in the center of two 9"
lengths of 1 x 2. Clamping the two boards together, mark
the center and drill a hole through both pieces at once,
the same time as the threaded rod, in my case 5/8".
Partially thread the nut onto the bolt and slide it through
the hole, trace the nut with a sharp pencil, turn the
boards over and do the same on the flip side, being careful
to align the nuts similarly (I found that a few parallel
lines drawn on the boards help). Remove the clamps, and
chisel out half of the thickness of the nut from each
piece. When the two boards fit together without any gaps, I
glued and screwed them together with the nut inside.