A Homemade Cheese Press
Building a home cheese factory for $15, including instructions and pictures.
By Keith Bellinger
October/November 1994
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Keith Bellinger
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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.
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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.
