Jamie is going to attack his prosciutto in the next couple of weeks. It has been aging/curing in Peter’s facilities for the last eighteen months or more. He is planning to use the Spanish method of putting it on a stand and carving off thin slices. He mentioned that he was going to shop around for a carving stand. I did some searching on the web and found several widely differing designs and examples of stands:

Some of these are VERY expensive – like $400 dollars.

The wooden examples in the first link above looked rather basic and pretty simple to construct if you have the materials and a few tools. So, I decided to make the the stand you see here:

with another view here:

and another view here:

The base of the stand is an old solid oak chopping block that we had laying around. It measures 20x9x2 inches and has four rubber feet on the bottom at the corners. The vertical piece of wood is another piece of solid oak and measures 12.5x5.75x.75 inches. I used a good circle cutter attachment on my drill press to cut a 4 inch diameter hole in one end and then used a band saw to complete the U shaped opening where the shank of the ham will go. The vertical piece of wood is attached to the base with four 3x3 inch corner irons – two on each side (staggered so that the screws from either side don’t smack into each other). The eye bolts in the vertical piece are to hold the shank of the ham. They are 1/4x20 bolts about 3 inches long. Not visible are two threaded brass inserts in the holes where the eye bolts go through the wood so that there is something for them to bite on. The round device on the surface of the base is a 2.5 inch hole saw that has had its back side (the side that normally goes toward the drill when it is mounted to make holes) cut off with a hack saw. I made four cuts about 3/8 inch deep in the base surface where the cutoff hole saw can be moved/adjusted to act as a non-slip grip on the bottom of the ham.

Here is a picture of Jamie’s baby mounted on the stand:

And another view longitudinally:

The ham seems stable enough to allow for carving with a good sharp knife. If it is not, I have a couple of ideas for additions to add stabilization.

I had most of the stuff in my precious piles of saved miscellany in my workshop (Can you say packrat?) – wood, corner irons, brass inserts. Just had to buy the eye bolts and the hole saw. The hardest part of the project was cutting the back off of the hole saw after making the four semi-holes in the top of the base. I went through a couple of hacksaw blades doing this.

It remains to be seen how well this will work. Jamie tells me he will probably attack a couple of weeks from now.

Stay tuned.