TITLE: Maximally touching toruses
QUESTION [14 upvotes]: 7 identical cylinders can mutually touch each other, if sufficiently long.  For cylinders of different sizes, 8 can touch each other.
What is the maximal number of mutually touching toruses?  I suppose it might be 7, using the 7 cylinder solution. But perhaps there is something more clever.

REPLY [4 votes]: Just to answer the comment-question by "bubba" with a picture:
   
(Image from http://www.mathpuzzle.com/)

And see the paper "On the Number of Mutually Touching Cylinders" by K. Bezdek:
Combinatorial and Computational Geometry 52 (2005): 121-127.
(PDF download)
Update.
The cylinder problem has just been solved for $\infty$-cylinders
(Aug 2103):
"Seven mutually touching infinite cylinders."
Sándor Bozóki, Tsung-Lin Lee, Lajos Rónyai. arXiv:1308.5164: