Home-Barista.com

From umpteen burr sets examined, it's clear some grinder makers do not value a fine finish, preferring to put the money into other areas. A ding or two on the burrs and bloody good bearings makes more sense, no?

JonR10 wrote:You should know better (probably do),

that $5 in the shop is not $5 on the street. Hand in hand with a finer finish is more delicate handling and more robust packaging. Two burrs @ $5 ea shop cost @ replacement parts price margins probably adds $100 to the cost of a set of burrs, plus another $?.¢¢ for handling and packaging.

If one sums up all the cutting edges and takes as a percentage the dings, we're probably several places to the right of the decimal point. It's just not something to worry about. Outta sight : Outta mind.

cafeIKE wrote:A ding or two on the burrs and bloody good bearings makes more sense, no?

Dings? I don't care about the dings
Apparently you missed my point, and made up your own version of my post.

Knocking off the hanging edges is almost free and should be done as a matter of course by any self-respecting machinist. There is no need to change anything else, so no other cost need be incurred.

cafeIKE wrote:Two burrs @ $5 ea shop cost @ replacement parts price margins probably adds $100 to the cost of a set of burrs

Please, where do you get this *stuff*? Somehow you take the most extreme case from my example and double it to get $5 per plate? My post indicated $2-$5 for a SET was GENEROUS.

You think $5 cost (more like $1 per plate) will add $100 to the market price?? What do you think it cost to make the burrs in the first place? Reality check: stock set of Super-Jolly burrs runs about $40.

Nevermind. I knew I would regret responding.
Post whatever you please, I'm done (again).

Well from having a set of very poor quality Robur burrs, and a set of relatively high quality ones, I can assure you it makes a difference. I haven't cupped them side by side (takes too long and a PITA to change them), but the percentage of fines was dramatically different (can easily tell visually) and the grind time on the poor burrs was around double of the better ones. From memory I ran through around 10 pounds on the poor ones with only a marginal improvement. One of these days I will see if I can manually clean them up and have another go with them.

I'm with Jon on it all, I think its disgraceful to release a product with that poor a finish.

I'm actually breaking in some new Mazzer Super Jolly burrs right now. For some reason, I remember thinking that the finish was pretty crisp - almost better than the 4 year old burrs that came with my used grinder in terms of hanging edges. They also seemed to be coated in something, or made of a slightly different alloy, since they were not as shiny as the old ones. (These were not Duraniums.) Maybe that was just oxidation. Maybe the old burrs were terrible, replacements, or abused.

I've only run one and a half pounds through my grinder so far. I'll take a look again. There are probably too many unknowns to say anything conclusively, but maybe Espresso Parts offers better than average Mazzer burrs?

gyro wrote:Well from having a set of very poor quality Robur burrs, and a set of relatively high quality ones, I can assure you it makes a difference.

To be fair, the 'poor' burrs are a different design with very dull looking breaking area and a fines generation area a fraction of the OEM.



from Grinder burr seasoning?

The 'defects' in the OP photos are in the breaking area and unlikely to make any difference whatsoever in the coffee.

Other copy of macap mc4 has the same burrs
When I appealed to the service center and gave the photos, I was told that spare burrs had the same appearance.
I did not return the grinder so I am going to use it.
Thanks for your help!

ira wrote:Depressingly, the quality of coffee grinder burrs that's I've see is poor at best.

Well, here I am re-visiting Robur burrs again. Last I left this, 2 years ago or so, I had purchased a set of Robur burrs from Phalen and close observation upon there arrival showed this:


Needless to say I was disappointed in the lack of quality so I talked to everyone I could and sent a email to Mazzer. The next day a letter arrived apologizing and promising 2 new sets of burrs to make up for the embarrassing lack of quality. But nothing ever happened, checking with Phalen and his supplier it turned out that all the Robur burrs of that time were bad.

Flash forward to last month where I met Luca in the Mazzer booth who apologized and claimed he'd send the missing burrs as soon as he returned to Italy. I don't know if it's surprising or not, but yesterday one set of Robur burrs arrived via UPS from Italy and while they are not perfect, they are much better. The originals were vacuum sealed to a piece of Mazzer branded cardboard, the new ones are just put in a plastic bag allowing them to rattle in shipping, seems silly for a $160 set of burrs. But they look better. Here are 2 pictures of the new inner burr.

As you can see from this second picture. all is not perfect. but it at least looks like something that might actually do a good job.


If you want to know if you have the new or the old burrs, the new one's have 3 alignment holes and 2 threaded holes on the bottom along with a laser etched Mazzer logo and 0186C part number. The original burrs only had 1 alignment hole on the bottom and no markings. The other difference was the alignment of the key way. it's hard to know if they'd actually care about that, but the original key way points directly at a valley and the new key way points directly at a peak.

Ira

Ira,

Unless I have lost far more brain cells that I previously had counted, you let me examine that bad burrset in Anaheim. For the group, as bad as the photos make them look, I examined them using the lens on my Swiss Army knife, and they were nothing short of appalling. How they could sell those, or how they got by any level of inspection is mind boggling.

You saw the old set, and yes, they were appalling. Luca said they got tired of outside vendor problems and bought the machinery to make them in house.

Ira