My teen son has a job working at his college machine shop, cleaning up and general maintenance. I mentioned to him that I had wished even as a hobby that I took some machine shop courses as I enjoyed wood shop back in high school.
He mentioned it to his boss who was kind enough to arrange a 4th year student give me a crash course on Saturday mornings. He was happy to get out of weekend cleaning, happy times two.
Today was my first lesson and I decided to make two tampers. One for my Zacconi and one for my VAM/Caravel. I was able to make both tamper bases and get started on the rod. Not bad for half a day's work on a metal lathe. Only catch is that I used steel and not stainless for now. The new tampers are not as shiny like the chrome type of the original either.
Here is my work showing the poor fitting Caravel tamper vs my new tamper.
New VAM tamper base with barrowed rod\handle

Original large gap VAM tamper

New bases without rod\handle.

Brass tampers can have a very striking appearance. Some brass alloys are very easy to machine and to make have a great finish. You can make a brass handle for them, or else make one from ultra hard wood materials. Some aluminium alloys are also extremely easy.

Brass also makes beautiful handles for lever machines. However, you may need to use a low heat conductivity metal to connect brass portafilters to brass handles to prevent their becoming too hot to handle. Grade V titanium is excellent for this. (Though a bit expensive.)

Thanks rpavlis. My next project will be a bottomless portafilter and I will use brass if I was making a regular PF I would go with SS. Find brass imparts a negative taste to the coffee as experienced with my Zaconni PF which had exposed brass on bottom of PF prior to me having it cut to bottomless.

SS makes for less maintenance/polishing of the tamper. Different alloys of SS machine better than others, same with bronze.

I made some out of C6300 bronze that were hard to make but looked great. For myself I make them out of SS.

Hmm, will see about acquiring some SS. Not in to having to polish a PF on a regular base.

Here is a brass commercially available tamper base with a custom handle, all the flat topped tampers are SS 304.

I like the flat top tampers you made and with the verticle rod coming up you can check for level tamp, if you don't trust your thumbs













The brass is a Reg Barber Custom Tamper and the sloped SS is also a Reg Barber Euro Curved base on one of my handles.

I prefer the flat topped tampers so they can be cut to the headspace depth so the shower screen does not compress the puck.

Nice handles, are they woood. If so how do you get a lip on the bottom matching top of base ?

Are you inquiring about Redbone or mine?

I completed my Goliath coffee tampers as well as razor handle in SS. One tamper is for the Vam/Caravel baskets and one for the Zacconi Riviera. Needless to say they don't require any added weight when tamping. I went the opposite of the latest trend of short tampers and found the longer handles help me align the bases straighter.

redbone wrote:Nice handles, are they woood. If so how do you get a lip on the bottom matching top of base ?

I fit the wood to the tamper base and then turn the wood while it is in the tamper if I want a perfect fit.

BTW, your latest tamper and razor handles look very good!