English: Antique I. DeFrancisci & Son gramola dough kneader and mixer. I. DeFrancisci & Son, a pasta machine manufacturer located at 219 Morgan Avenue in Brooklyn, New York, originally built these machines in the late 1910s and DEMACO in Melbourne, Florida rebuilt them in 1998. They were donated to the New York State Museum in Albany, New York. I. DeFrancisci & Son became Consolidated Macaroni Machinery Corporation in 1927 and then DEMACO in 1952.
Pasta factories used these machines during batch production of pasta, where a discrete amount of semolina or flour was mixed with water in the mixer to make dough, then the dough was placed in the gramola for kneading. The gramola kneaded the dough as the large bowl rotated so the dough passed under the two giant rollers (rollers are painted black in the photo). The handwheels above the rollers were used to adjust the height of the rollers. Once kneaded, the dough was cut into strips and placed in a chamber of an extrusion press shown here. The extrusion press used a giant ram to push the dough down the chamber and through a die to form the shape of pasta. The machines shown in this photo were belt driven.