Stirring the Pot...

[John@PC]

Well, I can't speak for others, but not trying to reinvent or improve a pot stirrer---just trying to come up with one that works for me and my budget

I've gone down a similar road qdog and coming up with an "effective" curd stirrer for smaller-scale makes is darn hard.  If you have a 50 gal. or larger vat even 1" curds are small compared to the volume of the vat.  As you go smaller in scale then clumping becomes a real problem  .  You did an excellent job copying a commercial stirrer but again the small volume complicates things as you indicated.  I would like to know how your stirrer does with small (rice size) curds?   I wish you well in you're efforts to find a good design for round pots - looks like Paul will be a willing volunteer for testing.  For the time being I've adopted the "stir and do other things for a couple of minutes" routine until I can figure out how to automate stirring a rectangular pot.  I've also started extending the "healing" time for the curds to 15 min and have experienced less fracturing during those initial gentle "nudging" stirs or "tilts".