jjk232 wrote:Hi Jake,

I love the thorough review and the amount of work you've put into this! It's what makes the HB community awesome. I am really looking forward to your analysis and comparisons once you are back from your trip!

Thanks!

I've updated the first post with EY% data at the bottom, but I'm still wrapping my brain around the results. I'm setting up a couple plots to visualize the data and I'll add that to a comparisons section in the first post as soon as figure out what the data might be telling me and how to best present it. There is a measurable bump in EY, but I need to plot it against a few independent variables and see if my hunch is correct...

walt_in_hawaii wrote:There is definitely some variation in grind from batch to batch, the adjustment collar is a tad 'touchy' and just a hair of movement throws me off... or in, as it were. I wish the threads were finer on the collar so it would need more movement to make changes in fineness.

I believe this will get much better, Walt. I have a wide range of adjustment right now and it is very stable and tolerant of changing dose and/or beans in a very predictable manner. Way more of a sweet spot than my meticulously aligned Duramill burrs had. I've got the dial indicator waiting in the wings to see how the lower burr is doing and then I'll tackle the upper burr by using the marker test in a little while. It must really suck having a big conical that just stays aligned .

Cheers!

- Jake

Hahahahaha, nah, its all good... from all the reading I've done, the k10's grind is about comparable and very, very close in flavor nuances to something like, say, a monolith. Its just there has always been a retention problem with the former and of course, its why you pay for the latter. But with my mods to my k10, its really been showing itself up to be a poor man's version of monolith with regard to retention. Not as svelte and not as tidy a package and not nearly as sexy looking, but at the end of the day, same utility for a lot less money. Which works for me... but to help out others here on HB, I was actually thinking of making available a small run of delrin spiders so anyone with a few bucks could pick up a used k10 and convert theirs to something like mine. I had originally planned to do this with the SJ, but couldn't figure out how to reduce the rpms . A planetary gearset, maybe, but that's not something anyone could do easily. Of real interest, I went back to the Mazzer last week for a couple days while I had the k10 apart, and it allowed for a great taste comparison, as I had pulled enough cups from the k10 so that switching back to the SJ gave me a good basis to compare the flavors. it really highlighted the taste differences between the conical and flat... the SJ definitely had a thinner body, more sharp high notes... while the k10 accentuated deeper flavors but as a whole, 'rounded' notes and to me seemed better balanced and richer. Both the significant other (whom I acknowledge has better tasting faculties than I) and I preferred the grind from the k10 although the SJ was no slouch.

Oh, and a note on the SSP alignment on the SJ... I had the exact same issues as you, so I don't think its your burr carrier misaligned. My holes did exactly the same thing as yours, one of the screws is always 'tight' and not aligned exactly. When that screw is tightened down as far as it can go, I can still see a very slight space between the screw head and the burr... I had to take that screw out again, and grind it down ever so slightly, like 2 threads or so, then it fit and screwed in all the way and grounded the burr. But its disconcerting, the SSP holes are not exactly aligned to the carrier holes, they appear to be on a very slightly smaller circle radius.

Yes, it does appear that the target mounting bolt circle diameter is undersized on the SSP burrs, as it was on the Duranium burrs, as well.

I updated the first post of this topic to show a comparison of the Duramill and SSP burrs with respect to EY%, Beverage Yield, TDS and Brew Ratio. The results were more telling than I thought they would be, not in terms of an overall shift, but that the trend lines have different slopes between the burrs. Basically, the SSP burrs appear to do a better job of achieving higher EY% with lower beverage yield than the Duramill burrs. This seems like a solidly good thing. Even though I also had a tendancy to stretch the SSP shots longer than the Duramill burrs (less blonding indication in terms of color and viscosity), the shots that I pulled more ristretto had higher EY% on the SSP burrs than did similar pulls on the Duramills. I think this explains why I'm getting more flavor coupled with an increased mouthfeel/texture/body with the SSPs than I could get with the Duramills. I could get a crema monster with thick velvety mouthfeel before, but it would be relatively bland from a flavor standpoint, because I hadn't yet extracted enough of the nuanced flavors with such a short shot. I get a bit of a win/win with the SSP burrs.

Cheers!

-Jake

Not yet, Chris.

I've been enjoying and spreading the cheer of needle valve profiling too much (although Peter is clearly the ambassador) to set aside the time. It is near the top of my to-do list, right beneath removing my left group and getting my puck temp and pressure gauges installed. I will do it, and when I do I'll use a similar approach as last time with respect to using the same batch of beans before and after. I'll make sure I have enough to get all the data in one batch this time and pull each dose straight from the freezer. I'll also follow a better protocol for sampling, which should result in better accuracy and almost certainly lower TDS and EY numbers as a consequence...

Cheers!

- Jake

A note on fit up of Mazzer burrs. It took me a while to get the burrs I import from Italy to have the correct hole spacing. It appears that the SJ has a different hole pattern diameter from top to bottom. I had to settle on a split the difference value and opened up the counterbore diameter to 9mm. The use of a cheese head screw with its smaller head diameter also helps. I suspect that SSP copied a Mazzer factory burr and rounded the number to an even millimeter value. It caused me a bunch of grief with my original order years ago when putting one lower screw in would pop up the burr and if the tech wasn't watching the burr would end up slanted. As far as coffee grinding goes, you are going to have a few different geometries available depending on which factory it came out of. The main difference between the Mazzer factory and the aftermarket stuff I import is the radius in the flute area and how acute the flute angle is. This change in geometry is most noticeable when the roast gets real dark. I have a few Major grinders that work fine with my burrs but jug up with the factory burr which is more aggressive. And on the Super Jolly and Major, the vertical runout of the rotating burr holder, muck under the springs, and spring tension in compression all impact burr parallelism which is the biggest factor in particle size distribution. Factory tolerances as to perpendicularity and runout are important but then also using good techniques like not tapping on the screw driver to clean out the muck in the screw head and not cleaning out all the coffee sludge on the rotator and stationary burr holders. Rotating burr holder bends easily...
Its all sort of like having a bum front end alignment and then trying to test tire performance and handling.
jpboyt