He/him

Formerly on .ee

  • 30 Posts
  • 105 Comments
Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2025

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  • a good manual grinder will beat any fancy electric one

    It will beat any electric grinder in the same price range. There are may fine electric grinders, but even the most affordable “good ones” are several times the price of a great manual grinder.

    Now, I have at home an 1Zpresso J-Max. It’s excellent for espresso and super fast. It’s part of my travel kit with a Flair Pro 2. The J series are more espresso focused, from memory I think the K series are more drip/moka focused. The differences seem marginal at best. Good stuff, and pretty affordable. Kingrinder makes 1Zpresso clones, half the price but factory calibration is a joke.

    My main grinder is a heavily modded DF-64. It’s very good for the price too if you’re ok with tinkering, being one of the cheapest good grinders and probably equivalent to any grinder at least twice the price, especially with SSP burrs. They need some calibration out of the box but afterwards, they’re great.

    Avoid the Hario grinders like the plague. They’re absolute shit. Grinding takes literally FOREVER and is super uneven. It’s mind blowing how a company with such a name recognition can sell such a shameful and worthless product.




























  • TinkerCAD is ok for simple shapes and basic functional parts. It works by adding or subtracting simple shapes together (cubes, cylinders etc) to make more complex shapes. It’s quick, easy and instinctive but anything slightly more complex than a dozen shapes grouped together and/or iterative designs quickly become a time consuming nightmare. It’s like trying to format a magazine in Word.

    FreeCAD (or Fusion, OnShape, SolidWorks or any “serious” CAD software) use a parametric workflow. You start with a technical drawing by setting shapes, dimensions, angles and relationships (“constraints”), extrude or revolve this shape to create a solid, then continue by drawing another sketch on a face and adding more constraints, extruding this sketch, then… you get it. It has a much steeper learning curve, but once understood it’s much quicker and easier to build very complex shapes. Plus iterative designs are usually a breeze since everything is constrained together, so changing any dimension or angle in any sketch means the whole design will follow. It’s also trivial to add chamfers, filets, working with mirror and central symmetry etc. When designing functional parts, parametric design is the proper tool for the job.







  • I have the exact same grinders and use them exclusively for espresso. I would say that the DF64 produces brighter flavors and the J-Max a thicker body. But, as I use the J-Max as part of my travel kit with a Flair Pro 2, the difference might also be attributed to the narrower and deeper puck of the Flair compared to a traditional 58mm basket. I’d also tend to attribute the differences to blade geometry rather than size.

    I’ve heard that larger burrs produce less heat and help retain more flavors. I don’t know it there is a serious scientific study confirming it.