Hey, John.
Thanks for the reply. I think I'd better bow out of the discussion of the carts for now. I need to go back and read the pertinent posts to get a better understanding of the carts. I had thought it was just about the trade show carts but it appears I misunderstood. I'll keep up with subsequent posts, too, and see where the discussion goes. Maybe I can contribute more effectively later.

Rom

decent_espresso wrote:
I assume you mean things like this:
image
image

they do look good, I agree, and I saw their use is commonly seen with garage work benches.

I put the white ones on my workbench. The rubber allows a lot of side to side movement. I know you always test things to see how well they work but it is really important with these.

Hi all - I am sorry in case this has recently been answered, but does anyone know whether the DE1+ will ever make a return?
I am relatively new to this, but to me it looks as if the DE1+ was temporarily discontinued in March 2021, but never made a return. Does this mean the PRO will be the cheapest option for the foreseeable future?

Thanks!

Yes the Pro will stay the cheapest option. I think it was about costs and making production easier.

The DE1+ is no more, but it's because I'm more of an engineer than a salesperson, and I couldn't, in good conscience, put lower-quality, shorter-lived components into my espresso machine, just to lower the quality of the machine, drop maybe $30 off the build cost, and then sell the machine at a lower cost. As an engineer, I want to build the best machine I can, and a lower-cost, lower-quality machine, isn't gonna happen from me.

Better split shots

Our current double spouted portafilter (bottom right photo) does not always do a great job of splitting espresso shots that start slowly. The liquid will often preferentially go to one side, until the flow rate pucks up, and then it'll be even. That makes for even amounts of coffee in the two cups.

This has been something I've wanted to improve, and we've spent some engineering time over the years, making 3D drawings of "split spouts" that would solve this. We've made some 3D printed objects as prototypes, but each had issues, and we hadn't focussed enough resources on this topic, to truly solve it.

A few days ago, we saw that our tea portafilter manufacturer makes the crazy looking portafilter on the top left photo.

And another vendor we work with, makes the portafilter in the top right photo, which looks quite similar to ours, except that it can probably accommodate large filter baskets (20g baskets is the most our double portafilter can take), which would be useful.

We just got them in house, and I've asked one of my engineers to do a number of tests on both. We'll do low-flow-rate "shots" into two cups and weigh the results, trying at different flow rates.

The basic solution to this problem seems to be to have a "miniature cup" that temporarily holds the espresso, and is the cup fills, it spills out (hopefully evenly) into the two exits.

Have you got a double spouted portafilter design that you think really works well? I'd like to hear from any interesting ideas here.

-john

Since nothing in the supplied stream is defined, neither volume or location, I think the only solution would be to have 2 small matched holes, small enough to insure coffee flow is always restricted enough there is a puddle covering both holes by enough to case the flow to be even. Maybe some really clever flow engineer could do better, but given the randomness of both the flow and direction of travel, I don't see how. But then again, I'm not conversant in flow dynamics.

IMHO, a low initial flow will always create some "bad" conditions due to the density and speed of the liquid, i never weighted the 2 shots, but almost always, visually, are never the same, despite a perfect levelling of the machine.
Probably a "vertical" as possible design of the spouts could help a bit, but to allow to feed two separate cups there will be a limit in the height of the cups as well.
Just my 2cents thought.