Thanks for all the feedback! I sure learned a lot from making my first one and this one really came together quite quickly, all considered. I should have mentioned that I rubbed it down with a blend of carnauba wax, sweet almond, olive, and coconut oils to help protect the wood. I'll give it that treatment after every use. A member on another forum suggested using rubber cane tips on the bottoms of the dowels to prevent them from soaking up the whey. I'll have to buy some.
My Lancashire cheese is still in the press. I bought a dish drain mat to run the whey off into the boot tray I put under the press and it works really well, except that there were grooves in the bottom of the cheese when I flipped it - the drain mat has ridges on it. I really think the grooves will go away while the cheese is ageing, probably within the first days of flipping it while it is drying.
The looser holes for the dowels work really well - the boards move freely where my earlier effort was tight and I had to put some muscle into getting it all put together. Sometimes I wonder if my cheese got pressed properly because of it.
All in all, I give this design a thumbs-up.
