Cast vs Machined Burrs

So last Oct-Nov I was able to buy a nice used 804 with replacement set of 'seasoned' Lab Sweet cast burrs. I really like this grinder! It was very well aligned w/o any modding (Nearly a first that I've seen). I was coming from an aligned Bunnzilla with Red Speed SSP burrs installed so I didn't expect to be 'blown away' with the taste, and wasn't. (Here I should insert my taste preference in filter coffee is clarity and flavor instead of texture and sweetness, and I'm somewhat the same with espresso.)

So, after brewing / cupping with this grinder for a couple weeks with the Lab Sweet burrs I felt like I might have been missing something from my coffees and I wanted to compare a set of SSP machined / coated with the Dittings. Well in the meantime I ran across boytenterprises.com and got in contact with James "Pat" Boyt. After a bunch of discussion he offered me a set of uncoated D2 to test. This was great and after tasting and testing particle size distribution, I liked what I was getting. So, I bought a set of his Super Lattice coated burrs. These are made by an Italian company and this is what he wrote:

The 804 burrs I sell are an offering from one of the Italian companies that I work with. The burrs also fit a Mahlkonig Peak which was my original application for the burr. I sent the grounds out for sizing and the mean size between the cast Peak burr and my machined/ground burrs was within 25µm of each other. The main difference was that my burrs had a tighter distribution in sizing. This is probably due to the completely ground/machined teeth of the burrs I sell rather than the combination of ground/ as cast teeth of the Ditting/Mahlkonig offering.
My customers are mainly interested in life and consistency.
The choice for the steel for the 804 burr is D2 with a cryogenic heat treatment after tempering. The burrs are then coated with a Super Lattice coating. Ceramic in layman's terms.

Interestingly these coated burrs ground noticeably slower than both the Lab Sweet and the uncoated D2. These Super Lattice coated burrs produce very few fines and seem to be the most uniform between 450 - 600 micron (This is 4 - 5.5 on the 804 dial at my current calibration of .5 off of touching) Something else Pat wrote:

Reading your response again brings thoughts about tooth geometry. The more parallel the flute (groove) that terminates at the outer diameter is to the base plane of the burr, the more consistent the particle sizing is. The larger the diameter of the burr set the greater the possibility of being able to incorporate a parallel path to the exit. The challenge for most burr sets is to have a gap wide enough between the pair to admit the whole beans, start breaking them, and then force them towards the final teeth. Geometry for course grind is easier to accomplish because of the larger gap between the burrs. Note that coffee is discharged not only when the flutes line up but also leak out when the final teeth don't line up. The less difference between the particles discharged during line up and non-lineup impacts the ratio of unwanted fines to desired large particles.

I went and compared how parallel the outer flute paths were on both the Ditting and the Boyt. Interestingly they were very similar with the Ditting have a slightly longer outer path. So, I'm not saying that the Lab Sweet burrs are inferior, or bad in any way, but rather that they don't offer the clarity that a machined burr offers. Also I should mention that I'm running a set of these Boyt burrs in a BUNN MHG dual without any issues.

I can highly recommend these burrs! I feel they are as good or better than SSP, but that's a rather uneducated opinion! They're also quite a bit lower cost than the Lab Sweet burrs! Hopefully this is helpful to someone here.

The grinds on the right are the Ditting Lab Sweet. You can see there's much more fines, but still a very uniform peak size!

Great thread, have you seen how it compares to the stock K804 machined burrs?

The Mahlkonig E80 burrs seem the machined burrs with the same geometry as the PEAK/Lab Sweet burrs.

Dav wrote:Great thread, have you seen how it compares to the stock K804 machined burrs?

No I haven't. If someone on here wants to send me a set of stock burrs, that are in good condition, I'd give some feedback...