While the idea is great, the real life design leaves a lot to be desired. I bought this for my birthday last weekend. After trying three different times to use this, I came to the following conclusions:

1. The dies are almost all too close together allowing the pasta to touch and stick to each other during the extruding process.

2. The design of the dies is such that all of the hollow pastas are too thick.

3. Unless you physically stop after each cut of pasta & re-position the pasta, its stacks upon and sticks to and collapses upon each other.

4. The unit is an absolute nightmare to clean. The dies can take 10 minutes apiece to extract all of the dough from inside the passages.

This might be a good product with some additional engineering and a lot more in-home testing, but, as it is currently - no thanks ! Mine went back to the store after less than a week.