Pasta Machine Thickness comparison table

Since I started improving my polymer clay work by following tutorials and going to workshops I have found it very confusing when people give you a pasta machine thickness as the different brands (particularly Atlas and Imperia the main 2 quality machines) don't compare easily. I have an Imperia machine which I love, it is easy to take apart to clean, only requiring to remove the end plate on one end (the one without the knob) with 1 screw and then I can push out the rods by hand and clean the scraper plates. I recently acquired a cheap Kitchen Craft pasta machine which looks like an Atlas but it doesn't run smoothly and the clay always wrinkles up on settings 8 and 9 - I would pay the extra and get a quality machine if you can.

I spent a lovely day in London yesterday with the London Polymer Clay Group (it was a blissful 2 hours on the train from me which I thoroughly enjoyed and I managed to squeeze a flying visit in to the jewellery gallery at the V&;A museum too!). I had already made thickness chips for the 2 machines I have and Nina kindly allowed me to make a set on her Atlas so now I have all 3! Here's the measurements

This is what my chips look like

 They will probably be a bit different from machine to machine and possibly even from different sides of a sheet depending on how straight the rollers are but hopefully it's a useful starting point.

So if you want to compare I would say as long as you remember a 1 on an Imperia is about the same as a 2 on an Atlas, 3,4 and 5 are much the same and the thinnest on an Imperia is like a 7 on an Atlas.

(Toni the table won't be visual enough for you - your machine is very close to the atlas measurements)

Avoid contaminating your clay in the pasta machine with other colours of clay.

I am sure some of you know this already but I only just worked it out so I thought I would share it in case some of you don't know either.

I clean my pasta machine with a baby wipe between colours of clay. I wipe  the underside of the rollers (underneath the machine) where the crumbles sometimes collect and I wipe the top whilst turning the handle to make sure the rollers are clean. Sometimes though I still get annoying streaks of colour across my clay and I couldn't work out where they were coming from. I decided it was time to clean my pasta machine. My husband took it apart and cleaned it for me. Great!

Not  long after that a purple streak appeared on my white clay! Horror it had only just been taken apart and thoroughly cleaned! I played around trying to work out where the clay could possibly be coming from. I turned the handle to rotate the rollers backwards and there was my answer!

Pasta machine with stray purple clay on the rollers

I checked it out and if you turn the rollers backwards you get little stray bits of clay pretty much everytime. I am guessing my contamination comes when I inadvertantly rotate the rollers the wrong way a little. I guess it comes from the scrape plates at the bottom (where the crumbles collect on the outside).

Now I have incorporated rolling the rollers backwards as part of my cleaning routine and I haven't had any contamination issues since.

Pasta Machine Thickness Chips

For ages I have mainly used the largest and the smallest settings on the pasta machine (I have an Imperia one with 6 settings). I can't see much difference between the first 3 settings. I decided to spend 5 minutes making some reference chips from some scrap.

Pasta Machine Thickness Chips

There really isn't much difference between the first 2 settings, hardly worth having. So now I can check and see what the settings correspond to. Not sure how much I will use it but I am glad I now know not to bother with setting 2 at all.