Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Calibrating the Cheese Press

Sheepy wanted to know how to calibrate the cheese press that her dad built. Since he built one for me, too (yay!) calibrating the scale was something I could do for her.

I needed a bathroom scale that fit on the base of the cheese press.

I used an old jar between the presser and the scale. Then I hung 5 lbs of weights on the left side of the lever and read the weight on the scale. I recorded it on the bottom of tape on the lever so I would know where to put the weights to get the pressure I needed for the cheese.

This is a photo of 15 lbs of weight on the closest spot.  It puts 32 lbs of pressure on the cheese. If you click on the photo to enlarge it, you can see the calibration weights.

Here are the weights I measured with 15 lbs of weights. 

Here is a photo of the front of the lever with the calibration markings for 10 lbs of weights on the top tape and 5 lbs of weights on the bottom tape.

2 comments:

Samual James said...

This is just brilliant. I was quite wondering how to calibrate the weight and while browsing over the internet finally reached to your post, and pretty satisfied by the way you've illustrated it along with the image that how you did it. Keep writing such informative post.Will surely keep an eye on your blog for some more stuffs.

Scale Calibration Weights

TJ said...

Thanks for your comment. I try to explain things as simply as possible :) I didn't grow up hobby farming, so I know how overwhelming it can seem. Finding easy to understand and simple directions were always a help for me!