Okay, everything was going pretty well in making my first Tomme following linuxboy's recipe....
I had pressed under whey with 5 lbs for 15 minutes, flipped and pressed with 10 lbs for 15 minutes, flipped and pressed with 15 lbs for 30 minutes. Then I stripped off the muslin, drained the whey, and began pressing with 15 lbs in the pot until 5.4 pH.
After an hour I checked the pressing progress. Whoa! The 5 lb and 10 lb weights had slid off-center and the cheese in the mold was severely lopsided. Man, what to do now?
I rewrapped the wheel with the muslin, heated up some whey, and put the cheese back into the mold. The mold went back into the pot with the heated whey. I then used my press to apply gentle pressure to the high side of the lopsided wheel. It was an off-center pressing with 5 lb using 2 pulleys for 10 minutes (about 83 lbs total applied pressure).
After that pressing, the wheel looked a little more normal. Then I began pressing on-center using a wrench for the suspended weight. According to the recipe, I needed to apply 15-20 lbs. By my spreadsheet a one pound weight would do the trick. I figured the wrench was about a pound. The wrench combined with 2 pulleys gave me what I needed to complete my pressing.
So that convinced me not to stack my weights in the pot (or anywhere) unattended. Only one hour had gone by. I hate to imagine what would have happened had I confidently stacked the weights in the pot and went to bed. As it was, I was able to correct that mistake. I just thought I could get by with a little weight in the pot for this cheese. I will use my press in the future.
Hope this serves as a heads-up to anyone else heading towards this disaster.
-Boofer-