I talked about my new pasta extruder, the Torchio Model B, in a post awhile back. Im in love with the press, but mounting the Torchio is something that takes some consideration. The presses are traditionally bolted to a dedicated bench used just for pasta extrusion. While that sounds nice, I wasn’t able to sell the family on having a dedicated bench in the kitchen for extruding my pasta. That said, I had to come up with a way to mount the press to something. The Torchio comes with simply a flat ledge with two bolt holes in it. In other words – unless you’re planning on bolting it right to your counter or if you have granite counter tops you need some other means to mount it. I initially came up with a simple board that I screwed the press to and clamped it to the counter. It worked, but felt and looked clunky. So I decided to start prototyping a new design for mounting it.

I came up with a base design, and since some of the parts were rather specific sized, I went to my CNC to design the cutouts.

I had bought a Shapeoko CNC a few years ago but last year I bought some upgrades for it. Namely I bought the BitZero and then I made an add-on BitSetter using the same hardware. The BitZero is well worth the money IMO the bit setter will be handy if/when I need to switch end-mills but I haven’t had a use case for that yet. Anyways – it took some going back in forth with a caliper and the part to design the cutouts. The mounting holes aren’t parallel and the curved mounting piece isn’t either. I probably went through about 20 iterations before I was happy with the alignment…

Once I had the rough template I cut an example in some cheaper pine just to see how it would come out. The design is basically two 3/4 inch boards. The top piece has the insets for the the parts including some clamps. The bottom piece has two holes in it to capture the bolts that extrude through the holes to mount the press. The press is then hold into place with wing nuts. Some fine tuning to get the parts to align with some hand planes and I ended up with this…

Installing it is pretty straight forward. You clamp it to the counter…

Then just slide the press onto the extruding bolts and put on the wing nuts…

All done! I think Im happy with the design but I want to use it a couple of times in this prototype version to make sure Im really happy with it. I had thought about embedding an edge board on the bottom to catch the edge of the counter but Im not sure if that’s needed. Time will tell! Once I know I happy I think I’ll make one out of hard maple and put a food safe finish on it.