I like my coffee grinder pretty ok. Its got some clever engineering ideas, and works quickly and quietly. But the hopper jams all the time on the beans I tend to use, and because the jamming tends to happen right where the chute meets up with the auger, it can be really hard to unjam. Note that that I’m showing the hopper partially disassembled here. But it works very poorly regardless of the state of assembly.
After getting really annoyed with it a bunch of times, I decided to try to re-design the hopper.
This was my first try. Still jammed, but not as much. But the jams were still a pain to clear.
I decided to change up the design - if I just gave up and assume that jamming is inevitable, then maybe designing it to make jams easy to clear was worth a shot.
This actually works really well. Even though jams still happen, it’s less vexing because jams are so much easier to deal with. The chute is a detachable cup with some interfacing designed to match up to the base plate, and jams can be cleared by just a bit of shaking.
The cup has all the weird angles because of the really incremental design process. I started with a more rectangular tube with one face flat on the print surface, and then literally started cutting corners to save on print material. Then I designed in a support on the top face, because the tube was angled and would have probably fallen over otherwise. I like where the cup ended up, but I definitely didn’t start the design process with that in mind.
