Hi, I have just purchased a De Ve box grinder, but not yet received it. Do you have experience with how to adjust the grind on De Ve units? Thanks,
Ray

Most all of these vintage hand-grinders have a burr-adjustment "nut" underneath the lower/outer burr. Pull out the drawer and look up inside where the drawer just was, and you'll see the bottom of the burr-assembly. There should be an adjustment nut right there. You'll need to think about the whole "righty-tighty" thing to adjust the burrs closer for finer grind. I always think about it as if the grinder has no bottom, and I'm able to reach in through the bottom to adjust the nut clockwise for a finer grind.

Please post a picture of your De Ve once you receive it? Copper top on it? If so, those sure are pretty when they're restored and polished up. Congratulations! And remember, the first is only the beginning (as I consider the eight mills I've accumulated over the years ).

I'm hoping someone in our community picked this up on ebay. I was sooooooo tempted. It's a Jabez Burns, one of the early roaster manufactures now Probat. I'm guessing an early commercial sample grinder.

Grinder Logo Decal Project -- Thoughts?

The OrphanEspresso folks noted in their article on restoring vintage hand grinders that if refinishing is necessary, the decal is usually a casualty of the process. I recently found out that anyone can print decals (it just needs special ink-jet or laser-printer paper), and it occurred to me that having a library of high-quality printable hand grinder logos could be helpful.

Just to see whether it might work out, I massaged a photo of a De Ve logo -- had to work on the image quality, perspective, lighting, and colors -- and came up with the example below. It would probably be a whole lot easier to work with scanned images, but I went with what I had available. (A print file suitable for a decal would have a higher pixel density and presumably would look somewhat better.) (Editing to add that the image below is low-rez -- just 96 dpi -- and so not suitable for printing.)



I'm not a restorer (although I'm going to restore a poor old sweet-grinding De Ve mill that just needs a helping hand ... the other reason I was interested in that particular logo ) -- just someone who thinks that these logos are beautiful images in their own right, and that they could be handy when fixing up vintage grinders to help them live again.

So I'm wondering whether a library of such images might be helpful to have available, or whether other hand grinder aficionados might already be doing scans of logos...

Anyone?


Kind regards,
Josh in CA

What kind of scanner would one use, and how would one hold the decal near the scanner. I would like to replace the decals on one or two old grinders, and wondered how to do it.

PC

First of all please understand that I'm guessing here. I haven't tried scanning a grinder (yet).

But I think you would need a flat-bed scanner, and would need to place the front of the grinder flat against the glass of the scanner. When I was thinking about this, I figured I could use an old towel to drape over the whole thing to more or less mask off the area of the grinder itself.

Once you have a scanned image, you'd want to clean it up in Photoshop or (what I used) The Gimp.

I hope that's helpful. Again, please understand that it's not something I've done (yet) so I'm not speaking from experience.

Editing to add that I would be glad to do the image clean-up. I'm not a graphics pro but I'm not bad either.


With kind regards,
Josh in CA

JoshInCa wrote:Once you have a scanned image, you'd want to clean it up in Photoshop or (what I used) The Gimp.
Editing to add that I would be glad to do the image clean-up. I'm not a graphics pro but I'm not bad either.

If you look closely at the image that you presented in t a previous post, it's rather lo-res. I'm not sure if that's a result of Gimp, of posting it on the forum here, or of the original image that you captured. It looks great, it'd look fantastic at one or two orders of magnitude of resolution finer.
I was using simple Paint Shop Pro, and an older version at that, but that is sufficient to get a finer resolution image distributed. I'm going to go out on a limb that anyone that has purchased the product has a right to the image, regardless of what some self-interested intellectual property lawyers might opine. The owners give away an image or two free with purchase, I don't see an issue with replacing that, as long as no one is profiting from it, or worse, using it to mis-identify lower quality grinders.
I'd be ahppy to work on the images as well, if your issue is the third option that I described.

The lower quality of the image I posted is an artifact of the posting guidelines and screen resolution -- I saved that particular copy at 96 dpi. A printable image would be too large to post (a 1.5"x1" .png of the same image at 400 dpi runs about 450KB, more than the forum allows, even with high compression) and wouldn't render well on screen.

It's not perfect -- I still see a bit of distortion (the original was a photo taken with the camera sort of sideways to the front of the grinder), but it's a good deal better than what I could post. I'd be happy to Email you a copy if you like.

Kind regards,
-- Josh in CA

I have a photo pasted on the first page of this thread - with a really good camera and good skills (neither of which I have) maybe a photo would work best?

peacecup wrote:I have a photo pasted on the first page of this thread - with a really good camera and good skills (neither of which I have) maybe a photo would work best?

From the standpoint of reproducing logos, the best photo on the first page by far is your SunStag image (and incidentally, thank you for posting not only the images and your comments but in particular for posting the excerpt from SÓLARLIÓTH -- I hadn't heard of it before and was moved when I found it and read it thanks to your post). But even that one would have to be at a much higher resolution -- images sized for the Web or for screen display are typically at 72 or 96 dpi; I was lucky to find a De Ve image that was fairly large to begin with (although still low-rez) -- and as long as I'm making wishes if it were in perfect focus that would also help a lot.

Kind regards,
Josh in CA