Ditting KR1203 / KR1403 | Grind Chamber Cleaning And Maintenance

Mar 27th 2023 Written by John Erler

Transcript

Hi, I'm John with Prima Coffee, and today we're going to talk about basic cleaning and maintenance on the grind chamber of the KR1203 and KR1403 grinders. Today we will be looking at a KR1203 grinder, but it's very similar to the KR1403 So a lot of what we're doing here today is going to be the exact same procedure as what you would do on the KR1403.

So the first thing we're going to do is we're going to remove the hopper to get access to the grind chamber, lift up the lid and you'll remove the four flathead screws on either side of the grinder. With the screws out, we just lift up and the hopper and hopper top, come completely out. The next thing we need to do is we need to remove the stationary burr carrier. It is down in the grinder, so we need to have a little bit of reach. Usually I will use a longer, thicker screwdriver. I don't like using the mechanical screwdriver for this because it's very easy to drop the screws down into the base of the grinder. If you do that, you can retrieve them, but then you're adding some extra work. So just go slow and take these out with some caution. Okay, once we get those screws out, then we can lift the stationary carrier out, and we see our stationary burr. We go ahead and brush that off and clean it. One thing I like to inspect is there is an O ring right here which basically makes a seal between the hopper and the grind chamber. If this is getting older, worn out, you can go ahead and replace that as well. Once we have the stationary carrier removed, we're going to go ahead and go inside and clean the grind chamber and the rotational carrier and burr and it’s set into the grinder. So to give you a better idea of what that looks like, we're going to move over here and talk about it in front of this motor that's been removed from another grinder.I'm going to just simply brush out my coffee grounds and when it's in there, I would take a vacuum, suck up any residual grounds. I want to look closely at this, which is the transition tube that leads out to the discharge tube. If this is torn or ripped or is disfigured, in other words, not making a nice circle like this. We want to try to replace that part because that can cause unwanted clogging. Other things to look at are the condition of the burrs. The 1203 burns at about 800 microns are rated to around 15,000 kilograms. If you're not keeping track of your coffee, you can usually fill a particular dullnes, especially on the inner sides of the burrs. If you're getting lots of clogging or lots of fines, it's probably a sign that your burrs are getting dull and you might need to replace them. The other thing to look at is the wings on the carrier. These push the coffee around and they have a very tight tolerance to the inside of the grind chamber. If they are starting to wear on the sides that are next to the grind chamber inside of the grind chamber, then we need to replace this carrier. Otherwise, we’ll get clogging. A way to check this is really easy is we want to make sure that we maintain a little less than one millimeter of space between the end of the wing and the inside of the grain chamber. So I take two standard business cards and put them together and then I check it should take some force to push them in. I can take one and easily fit it into I can't really get down. If two are going in very easily, then that is a definite sign that the end of your wings are worn and it's time to replace the rotational carrier. So when we've cleaned this out and we've inspected everything, we'll go ahead and put it back together and get our grinder ready for operation. One thing I do like to check while we're doing cleaning and standard basic maintenance is to see that our grind calibration is set correctly so that our finest point is the finest point before the burrs touch. In order to do that, we're going to remove the knob and we're going to chirp the burrs to find the zero point and back it off and put the knob back on at its finest point. I'll go ahead and show you how to do that. So before I take the knob off, I'm going to turn it all the way to the coarsest setting and I'm going to go ahead and remove the knob by removing this flat head screw. So remove the cap and the cap spring and then I can just take the knob off. Okay. Now I'm going to turn it back until it turns no more, and then I'm going to go back to the left a little bit. Basically what I was doing was was finding the point where the burrs are touching, backing that off a little bit. I'm going to plug in the grinder and then I'm going to turn it on. Okay? So then I'm going to go back to the right until I hear the chirping sound and I'm going to back that off a little bit. Once we do that, we know that we have gotten to the finest point the burrs can be in, the closest point that the burrs can be in before the burrs are touching. So we get that. I'm going to take my knob, find the one setting the Turkish setting, and I'm going to place it back on so that the indicator is pointing to that finest setting and then I'm just going to put my spring on and grab my cap and screw it back in. We have completed the cleaning and maintenance of the 1203 1403 grind chamber, put the grinder back together, check the calibration and we're good to go. I'm John with Prima Coffee and thanks again for watching.