Cheese harp
A frame strung with fine wires or blades, drawn through the set curd in the vat to cut it into pieces.
Also: curd harp, curd knife, lyre
A cheese harp is the tool used to cut set curd, named for the parallel wires stretched across its frame. Drawn through the gel in one direction and then another, it cuts the curd into columns and then cubes, which lets whey run out of the cut faces. Harps come with different wire spacings, because the size of the curd pieces largely decides how much whey is lost and so how moist or firm the cheese will be. Large curd gives a soft cheese, rice-grain curd a hard one. In Italian grana dairies a balloon-shaped whisk called the spino breaks the curd by hand. Large modern vats have mechanical cutting frames.