Tortilla Press

Hi All,

This is a tortilla press I made for a Christmas present. (I hope they don’t see it here in the next few days)
It is made from re-purposed (old university bunk beds) maple.
I took inspiration from Steveinmarin here.
Finished with a food safe butcherblock/salad bowl finish that I found at the local Home Hardware called “Terra Nova”.

My wife was telling some folks at the cafe ( shameless plug – we own the cafe) about me building this and already some people want to order one.

It’s about eight inches square and the boards are about an inch thick. I ran the dado blade partway up the edge of the top on both sides to provide a handle to lift it. I wedged the ends of the pivot dowel with small red oak wedges.

Hinges are solid brass to avoid any rusting.

My drill press is about ten years old and is a tiny bench top one, and it doesn’t have the travel to drill through 4 inches. So I scrapped a few pieces trying different methods. Drilling from both ends to meet in the midle, etc. I finally finished with sloooooowly drilling down the extent of the quills travel and then put a block underneath and repeated this till it finally came through the other end. It still wasn’t a straight hole but nobody will know except me. . . except that now I’ve told the whole world. . .

I also made a sketchup model if anyone is interested.

Thanks for looking,

Mike

-- http://www.heartofsackville.ca/