I've wondered whether the evolving logos could be used to help date various mfr's mills. There seems to be little information about how to date mills* (or ID mills without a maker's mark -- I remember seeing something about the number of points or vanes on an upper burr), and in my idle moments I've been curious about that.

A couple of weeks ago a German or Dutch eBay seller listed two books on coffee mills (sadly, the price was higher than my credit limit at the Bank of Behind The Sofa Cushions), so maybe the information is already available in part, at least ... does anyone know?

With kind regards,
Josh, in CA







* PS, just to pre-empt suggestions that I could start by casually asking them out for coffee ...

One of the coolest DeVe's I've seen (and happen to own):

Here is the sunstag from my original Dienes - you can even see the little gold paint I used to patch the decal. Looks like the antlers are a little more branched than the previous Dienes mokka I posted?

What a pretty logo ...

Here's how it looks "cleaned up" (as best I could), at low rez (96 dpi). I made a guess at the actual height and width -- it looks a little smaller than I imagine it should, now that I see it, but that's me, guessing.... If anyone's interested, I could put up images of the intermediate stages of the clean-up to show more or less how it's done.

Kind regards,
Josh, in CA



On edit - a second, larger version, slightly lower quality (to stay under the posting guidelines), same resolution ...

If ya get 'round to making decals, I'll have two of those, please. Double nice!

Wow, those look really great, even in the low-res form for forum posting. I bet they would look stunning in hi-res digital. Bot even still.. If you took that second image, exactly as it appears on the forum post/computer screen and made a sticker from it, it would go great on my PeDe.

Ive got a model 550 Mokha.. It is a Knee Model. During the Resto, the logo didn't all make it. Only the "red dot" with the Stag and "PeDe" made it. But, it kind of gives my grinder a unique twist. I posted pictures(or possibly links to pictures, i forget) when I first got it, a couple pages back, if you want to see it.

If you DO make some "full" PeDe decals, like the ones posted above, Id like a couple. One or two for the grinder, and another one or two for my coffee/espresso collage Im working on.

But, seriously.. Those decals look fantastic!

@JoshInCa No worries we are all on the same stuff here.

As far as the gold leaf tinted backgrounds, that can be done with some of the foil thermal printers now. These are the same ones that are used for decals now. But it is a multipass process with registered printing. You can get a thermal backed gold leaf for several of those processes, but it is not a small batch run.

-C

After some experimenting and further research, I have disappointing news. It looks as though printing (maybe) acceptable-quality decals would need a fairly specialized printer (an ALPS) which is no longer marketed in the US, and which would apparently cost between $700 and $1200 US, best guess, to get going.

It might be possible to get short runs of decals printed by someone who already has gone through all of that. Has anyone looked into this? I may just be low on caffeine at the moment, but it suddenly seems like a high hurdle for a decal that may end up not being sharp enough to fool the eye...

With kind regards,
Josh, somewhat discouraged in CA

PS - in case it's worth going forward, what made it possible for the Pe De image to turn out (to my eye, anyhow) so much better than the De Ve image was the relatively high quality of Peacecup's original photo. It's large and it's at 180 dpi, and it's not rotated much out of parallel with the plane of the camera. I'd like to find out the height at center and width at the widest point of the original logo and make some (hopefully final) tweaks...

I think this link might be a nice read. Especially the part with all the links to custom decal making guys.

I just stumbled across this site and thought it might be interesting for those who love antique hand grinders (apologies if it's already been mentioned):

http://www.javaholics.net/