gr2020 wrote:Thanks guys! Steven, you feel my pain! Hehe.

Bob, I am indeed upgrading from the BDB...it will hopefully find a new home.



That seems like a great tip. How much travel is there in the paddle between those marks? It's not really clear from the videos I've watched.

Not very much at all. Its in the realm of mm between them.

The new machine is being bench tested today. Zach at LM was kind enough to send me some pictures - here are a couple of them:





I'm very excited!

For water, for now, I have some third wave water espresso mix, and some distilled water. I'll start with that, and maybe start mixing my own later with the BH recipes.

Delivery appointment scheduled for tomorrow. I think these last 24 hours are going to be the hardest!

The new machine arrived today - omg they bring out the big trucks for these!



I went through the setup to bleed the group, and started playing. One thing I noticed was when moving the paddle slowly to the left, the valve in the group would open before the pump came on. Staying in that zone (with the pump still off) would result in a little water dribbling out, brew boiler pressure dropping, and eventually stopping.

I didn't think this was how it was supposed to work - I thought the pump was supposed to come on first, then the valve would open. Chris at LM confirmed this was indeed the case (which is the opposite of how the old MP worked). Anyway, turned out my micro switch needed to be adjusted.

After a quick trip to Home Depot to get the necessary tiny #0 Phillips head screwdriver, I made the easy adjustment of the switch recommended by Chris, but unfortunately it couldn't move far enough to fix the problem. He then told me what needed to be done (a different adjustment of the switch), and offered to have a tech come out if I didn't want to try it, or if I did try and somehow messed it up. After getting an understanding of how it worked, and exactly what needed to happen to get it working as designed, I went in and made a couple of adjustments. Success!

The switch is the light blue box in this picture, looking down at the group with the cap removed:



I felt really good about having fixed this myself, as now I understand exactly how the mechanism works. It was a little annoying that it didn't work correctly out of the box, but the LM guys were amazing and super helpful on the phone.

Here it is now, all up and running:



I have yet to make a great shot with it - lol! This machine seems to expose every tiny flaw in my basket prep - which I thought was pretty good, but I'm being put in my place now. I didn't realize just how forgiving my old BDB actually is in terms of basket prep.

Random thought to leave you with - these ridged baskets make it easy to see when your tamp is slightly slanted. And I have no idea how I'm ending up with a slanted tamp using my LevTamp.

Greg,

I have noticed that my Strietman baskets have a bit of a convex shape if the opening is facing you. When I use my levtamp I hold the basket with my thumb and pointer finger so it doesn't "ride" on the convex shape. It is very very slight but it will make your tamp a bit uneven.


Braden

bradenl123 wrote:I have noticed that my Strietman baskets have a bit of a convex shape if the opening is facing you. When I use my levtamp I hold the basket with my thumb and pointer finger so it doesn't "ride" on the convex shape. It is very very slight but it will make your tamp a bit uneven.

Interesting. The LM precision baskets seem to be completely flat on the bottom. I've been tamping in the PF, though, so maybe I just have a weird angle going on with the handle that I'm not used to. I'll try popping out the basket and tamping that way for a while. Thanks - I should have thought of this!

If you have a distribution tool, you might try setting it to a depth of 8 to 10mm and just use this...no additional tamping. I assume you WDT even with the MonoCon.

BTW: Totally sweet set-up!

Turns out my basket prep is fine, for the most part, I think - there were two things causing issues:

1. There's not a lot of head space, and some of my early extractions were over-dosed and pretty much touching the screen before any water even started pouring.

2. For some reason I've been obsessed with perfect looking pours, including on lighter roasts, and I think I need to get over it. I'm getting more small dead spots with the GS/3 than I typically had with the BDB, but they go away within a few seconds - so I think all is well.

I'm a little frustrated with the LevTamp. For months now I thought I was getting perfectly level tamps every time without thinking about it, but now with the ridged baskets, I see that I'm not. So I actually have to be careful with the tamp, and pay attention to doing it nice and straight. And here I thought money could compensate for laziness! Haha.

A few observations so far:

- The screw in the dispersion screen is pretty thick. Doing the nickel test, even a 17g dose of a light roast in the LM 17g basket will push the nickel down into the coffee. But what I've found in a practical sense is if the screw head just touches the dry coffee bed (so you can just see a slight outline of it when pulling out the dry PF before pulling the shot) all is well (just barely). If it actually makes a deep indentation, that's too much. But a nickel will pretty much _always_ get pushed into the coffee bed with a reasonable dose size (i.e. over 16.5g).

- I tried some relatively old (roasted 5/2) Dragonfly crema dolce. I didn't like this coffee when I first tried it a few weeks ago; tasted super dark, bitter when straight, boring with milk. Tried it again this morning (mostly because I was out of everything else and wanted to pull more shots). Went straight to full pressure, and the shot poured nice and thick (and pretty - I can't stop watching haha). It was actually much more tasty than I had in my notes from earlier - very thick mouth feel, didnt taste super dark, no bitterness at all. Color me surprised, as these beans should be super stale by now.

- Everyone says it takes about an hour to warm up - but I found it's up to temperature (according to the display) within 15 minutes or so. I assume letting it go longer to stablize is a good idea (which is what I did), but I'm curious how it would be immediately after coming up to temp.

Greg,

Interesting what you observed about the LM dispersion screen screw head. I noticed online when looking at competition dispersion screens for the BDB that some screens are made without being countersinked for the center screw for various machines such as the LM's. I guess having a protruding screw actually makes it easier to observe spacing (just touching the screw head) than using a germ covered nickel.

Just curious but how low does the surface of the coffee sit in the pf?

In other news, holy heck this steams fast! While I was pulling the dragonfly, I made a cappuccino just for fun. Steamed 5 oz of milk in what seemed like about 10 seconds.

The great thing was, I actually got some good texture, and was able to pour a little bit of art (which is rare for me). With the BDB, the steaming process was so much slower, I think I had plenty of time to wonder if I had enough air yet, and I would keep introducing "just a little more". I would almost always end up with _way_ too much air, which would tend to pour in a big blob. To be fair - this was of course my fault, not the machine's fault.

With the GS3, the steam is so powerful I was totally nervous to start, and because of that somehow managed to introduce _just_ enough air for once. I think I did the "sucking" phase for literally less than a second. And the whirlpool is so violent, it can't help but mix things up quite well, it seems. We will see if it's just beginner's luck or not.

Bob, to your question about the coffee depth...I don't have a ruler, so I'm not sure how to answer that. It's usually maybe a couple of mm below the bottom of the ridge in the basket, at least in the 17/18g, which is the only one I've used so far.