So attempt number two was just as bad as attempt number one?

I didn't get much chance to look at the inside, but the drum seemed to have a lot of nooks, crannies and gaps where the turning vanes meet the cylinder. Designing a workable drum is a non-trivial engineering exercise, and this company didn't quite master it.

Ken Fox wrote:In summary, run, don't walk, away from this ebay listing. Your life is complicated and messy enough without this thing. I only paid $217 (delivered) for this thing, and it was no bargain.

This is sad news for me....too bad it wasn't posted last week (that was when I bought one myself). Apparently these get warehoused in the Houston area and I paid $275 for mine, delivered. I have no idea when it will come, but it sounds like it will be an ornament rather than something I can hotrod for roasting.

Oh well - at least I know not to try it indoors!
I may still play with it some, but it sounds like a sure disappointment.

Ken,

Thanks for the reports, and for taking one for the team. I came very close to pulling the trigger on one of these earlier this month.

Jon--I feel for you. I could have been with you. Sometimes it's better to be lucky than good, as I've bought some questionable things in the past.

JonR10 wrote:This is sad news for me....too bad it wasn't posted last week (that was when I bought one myself). Apparently these get warehoused in the Houston area and I paid $275 for mine, delivered. I have no idea when it will come, but it sounds like it will be an ornament rather than something I can hotrod for roasting.

Oh well - at least I know not to try it indoors!
I may still play with it some, but it sounds like a sure disappointment.

Jon,

Jim was convinced that it was a POS the time we tried to roast with it, but I proclaimed that our problems might have been due to "operator error." This would not be surprising, since there were no instructions whatsoever that accompanied the roaster. It took a second try to convince myself that the thing was in fact a POS, and that second attempted roasting session occurred today. I am one pound poorer of Ethiopian Worka as a result

This means that you are going to have a choice, not one that I would choose for myself. The choice would be whether you want to just let it be an objet d'art, or if you want to try to roast on it. If you choose the former, it will look pretty good in your living room. If you try to roast on it and decide it isn't worth the effort, the paint job will burn off (assuming they haven't found better paint in between our purchases) and although you could leave it in your living room, it won't look as good. If you do decide to roast on it, heat it up to a pretty high temperature for 15 or 20 minutes at first, without beans, because the paint needs to burn off before you can safely use it (if even then).

There is a third choice, which I'd actually recommend. That would be to try a dry run, without heating up the roaster. Charge the roaster with up to a pound of green beans, but with the roaster in the unheated condition. Preferably, use some old over-the-hill green beans you don't care about for this dry run. See if you can turn the crank without the beans flying out the trap door. You will need to turn the drum over a period of several minutes, at least, in order to establish this (assuming for the moment that there isn't something special about roasting beans vs. cool green beans that I haven't thought about). If beans start flying out the trap door and the turning of the drum itself becomes hard, then you are simply replicating my problems and I'd just empty out the thing and use it as a table ornament.

If on the other hand the thing turns smoothly and you have no problems, then you could try roasting with it. In that case it could turn out that my roaster was simply a lemon and that the basic design was sound (which I doubt, but I accept the possibility that I"m wrong, and I REALLY REALLY REALLY wanted to be able to recommend this product, so that would be good news from that standpoint).

In any event, please let us know in this thread how this whole thing turns out.

ken

If the cranking and expelling beans issues could fixed(I have some nice gearhead speed control motors), how was the heat application potential to the beans? Could a little yankee ingenuity make it usable?
Ed

Ken, it sure would be nice if this worked out. Perhaps you could get a local welder to seal up some of the gaps. (Or maybe someone in the forum is local to you and is a welder).

Mark

The beans ooze out everywhere.

Trying to do just one batch ends up with beans that have worked their way out of the drum (somehow) that go all over the cooktop burner. How they got there, I don't know, but the same thing happened both times I/we tried to use it. Also, there is a chaff collecting tray below on one side. At the end of an (attempted) roast, it ends up being full of charcoalized beans (not chaff; beans). In addition, beans are trapped internally. When you dump the beans out of the drum (which is a major undertaking, requiring a spoon to dislodge beans otherwise retained) you get beans of every color imaginable, including some that look like charcoal. The latter are presumably beans that have been trapped inside somewhere that might have made it though a roast or two earlier and remained in the drum, only to be expelled later.

There are some very major design issues with this thing that I think would present an enormous challenge to anyone hoping to modify it to make it usable.

ken

Ken Fox wrote:
There are some very major design issues with this thing that I think would present an enormous challenge to anyone hoping to modify it to make it usable.

...

In any event, please let us know in this thread how this whole thing turns out.

Thanks Ken,
Sounds like if I do want to roast with it, it'll need a complete teardown and rebuild including a newly-designed drum and strip/repaint with high-temp paint (like the paint I used on my RK grill diffuser plate that's held up well).

Maybe I should shoot a plea for help to Len (CoffeeRoastersClub) and see if they would tweak up a drum to suit, if I can even envision a workable design for the roaster. If not Len, then I do have friends who do a bit of welding here and there, so that is another possibility.

JonR10 wrote:Thanks Ken,
Sounds like if I do want to roast with it, it'll need a complete teardown and rebuild including a newly-designed drum and strip/repaint with high-temp paint (like the paint I used on my RK grill diffuser plate that's held up well).

Maybe I should shoot a plea for help to Len (CoffeeRoastersClub) and see if they would tweak up a drum to suit, if I can even envision a workable design for the roaster. If not Len, then I do have friends who do a bit of welding here and there, so that is another possibility.

Personally speaking, if you wanted to build a custom roaster, I think it might be easier to just start from scratch.

ken

Why not just return it? If you want to waste $275, I will give you my Paypal account and you can deposit the money anytime you like!