Hello folks.

Before I begin I just wanna say Hello! I've referenced this site & it's forums many times through out my beloved adventures in making an excellent espresso. So i've finally decided to join up & ask for some help in something I haven't been able to figure out (even by looking for previous posts).

So I have a Gaggia classic that i've been using & it has made some pretty good espresso shots with the coffees I've ground (I grind them @ the store). I recently acquired a rancilio MD 50 & I know it's not really meant for home use. It's a commercial grinder that I got at a great price, but it needed a little cleaning. I followed several cleaning instructions specific to the MD 50 & was able to get the burrs removed, cleaned & put back together. I then preceded to set the dial @ 0 when I heard the burrs touch. I moved the dial to many settings from 20-45 & even went beyond it's 45 dial limit just to see if the grinds changed drastically.

The grinds from 20-45 where fine & feel like what espresso grinds should feel. The grinds toward 20 felt a little finer & from 30-40 felt better suited. When I went beyond those settings they felt & looked like french press kind of coarse, so I didn't go any further. All of the grinds when dosed into my portafilter, tamped correctly with 30lbs of pressure from a steel tamp produced 0 espresso. not even a drop. I figured maybe the grind is too fine or im tamping too hard. As I made it coarser I stopped when I reached a coarseness I didn't feel was right for my machine. I noticed that when I tamped the grounds stuck to the bottom of my tamp, that's never happened before. Also there was a puddle on top of my portafilter when I took it out & the puck was hard!

This morning I tried grinding again, poured beans into the hopper & turned it on. It grinded for 10-15 seconds before turning off. I was puzzled. I lifted the hopper from the base of the top burr and looked around & placed it back on the base, turned off the switch. I turned it back on & again it grinded for 10 seconds before turning off.

So there you have it, maybe it's several problems, maybe it's something obvious to you guys & not to me. I just want to make a great espresso & sad that I can't. Help!

I fixed the issue. Turns out that I just needed to keep trying different settings beyond what I was used to. The dial goes up to 45, but I needed to move it past it & start over from 0 a second time.

I also found out that the machine shuts off automatically when you're grinding with the lid off. I like to watch what happens, but if you own one of these it's best to wait.

These may have been obvious fixes to some. But I'm learning on my own, SO THANKS FOR ALL THE HELP!

Hi, I haven't owned or extensively used your model grinder. Your model is a semi automatic model with a switch in the doser. That is stop users from filling it up with ground coffee in a shop environment. Rancilio was ahead of the times when that feature was built in.

Regarding the grind setting, I guess you just had to learn the tough way. That grinder can go as fine as talcum powder if you continue with the adjustment ring.

What's strange to me is that there is no box inside the Doser that I've seen in other MD 50s. There are a couple of holes that look like it could be installed. I opened up the top if the Doser & it definitely didn't look full, it's turning off after 5-10 seconds of turning the on switch. I used a brush to pull out some of the grounds in the little square nook the grounds are coming from & forgot to in plug it. It turned on after brushing some grounds out. So I'm thinking there's a sensor somewhere that I'm not seeing.

Can you take some pictures of your MD-50.
My MD-50 looked like this when it arrived as an AT (automatic).
I converted it to an ST.

I'm guessing this is the box you are referring to. I removed it from mine:

I am guessing this is where you see holes for your box; I pulled the wires back into the housing and filled them with gasket maker (RTV)


I don't know if you can see it in the first picture, but there is a square button at the back of the front. There is another one on the other side. When I want to turn this MD-50 on, I have to engage both of those buttons; to turn it off again I just engage the one on the left.