Hello everyone!

TLDR: I designed a short hopper for the Ditting 804 (Lab Sweet)

First time poster here. I wanted to share my recent Ditting DIY hopper. I will add a bit of context in case you don't own a Ditting, or if you are thinking about purchasing one but feel like its massive height won't fit under your cabinets. Ditting machines, specifically the 804 series, are amazing industrial grinders used in shops all over the world. Like many other commercial grinders, they are designed to be in shops and need to handle large quantities of beans. For that reason, commercial grinders are designed with a large hopper to make the life of barista's a bit more efficient (of course at the arguable expense of the beans becoming stale). Because home baristas are sort of a relatively niche market for large companies like Ditting, machines are still designed with large hoppers for coffee shops. For us home users, this often becomes a problem due to its tall height that may not fit in some of our home setups, and its unrealistic to expect an OEM single dosing hopper from Ditting especially as they are even more of a niche in people's homes.

Now, I am not here to talk about the fantastic grind shape and quality the Lab Sweet burrs produce. If you know, you know. If you don't, then try to find someone to brew you a pour over or espresso with a lab sweet. Anyways, I have been tinkering with making a shorter hopper to make a better user experience for me and my setup. Although I have good clearance between my countertop and cabinets, the lid cannot fully open when I dose my beans. I have a background in all sorts of engineering and have a good 3d printer at home, so I decided to design something that will solve my problem. I want to share it with this community and see if there are any other Ditting users that can give me your input. I plan to create future versions of the hopper design and share the final files with you all, for free. Anyways, enough with the rambling, here are some pictures!

I started here but I really didn't like the way this looked.


I used the original hopper coupler.


The final design is a three part print. The first being the base that couples to the grinder. It has two posts on the funnel that attach to an umbrella to stop popcorning.




Finally, there is a mini dosing hopper that just lets the beans in. It's offset to the actual funnel/hopper where the beans go through. This reduces the chances from the beans shooting back up towards the inlet. Popcorning directly hits the umbrella and then go back in to the burr chamber.



So far its working really well! I have other ideas on features like a slide screen (like on ek43s) but I save those for later in the thread

For all you nerds, here are some screenshots of the 3d model

Nice work! What's the height now that you've made these modifications?

p.s. We're S. FL neighbors, I see.

This is awesome. I am hoping that I will be able to convince you to sell me one

The new height of the hopper is 3/4 inch. The original size of the hopper is 4.75 inches!

Sorry--I meant the total height of the grinder + modified hopper! You knocked 4 inches off of the original height, so now is it ~15 inches high?

Ah yeah, without any hopper, the body is roughly 14 inches (18.75 with the OG hopper). Now with he modified hopper its 14.75inches and it allows you to pour directly to the mini hopper without having to open the lid, which does add another like 4 inches to get an opening large enough for your hand to drop in the beans!

And yes, we are neighbors! We (Rue) are actually new roasters moving to Miami in the next couple of months or so. Our roasting experiments/training were/are based in NY and Denver right now, but will move to Miami soon

Following this thread. Want a short hopper on my 804LS finally and this is one of the better ones that i have seen.

Also following.

Rue - your design is lovely and if you are willing to share it would be very much appreciated. Happy to support in any way I can.