Ditting KR1203/KR1403 Maintenance | Discharge Chute Inspection And Transition Tube Replacement

Mar 31st 2023 Written by John Erler

Transcript

Hey, this is John from Prima Coffee, and today we're going to talk about inspecting the discharge shoot and replacing the transition tube on the Ditting KR1203 and 1403 grinders

So the first thing we need to do is we need to remove the discharge tube housing. There are six screws on the front and these are fairly small screws and they will strip on you easily. So I recommend doing this manually with a small screwdriver that properly fits the head. This is a Philips, so I'm going to go ahead and take these off. Okay? Now that we removed the screws, we can remove the front operation panel. This will show us four flathead screws. These are the screws that attach the discharge housing to the front panel of the grinder. So I'm going to go ahead and remove those. All right. So we successfully removed the discharge housing. I'm going to go ahead and just look at the housing assembly. There are two springs inside of here that give the discharge tube the springiness that it has. I'm just going to look and make sure that they look okay. If you have a broken spring, this will be a time to replace it. Also, there is basically a rubber bag clamp back here, going to make sure it's not cracked. It looks like it's in good condition. And then lastly, I'm going to check the handle here on the discharge tube, make sure that it's structurally sound. These will break after a while. The ball at the end of the handle is replaceable, but the handle itself is part of this discharge tube assembly. So if it breaks here, you will have to replace the whole assembly. So now that we've removed the discharge housing, we can take a closer look at the transition tube. If you watched the earlier video about cleaning the grind chamber, we looked at this tube to make sure that it wasn't cracked, torn, wasn't deformed. Again, we're doing that here. But in this situation, we're going to act as if we need to replace this. You can remove these two flathead screws to the side and replace the rubber tube and the washers that come with that part. However, it's pretty difficult to get those screws in and out without dropping them into the body unless we remove the front panel. So we're going to go ahead and remove the front panel so that you can see how this assembly comes out and goes back in on the outside of the grind chamber. So to remove the plate, we need to remove eight bolts. There's four at the top, four at the bottom. I need to put the grinder on its side. So what I'm going to do is go ahead and remove the hopper. I've already removed the four screws that hold the hopper onto the grinder, so take that off and set it aside. Next, I'm going to take the grinder carefully and move it on its left hand side so that the handles, the grind adjustment knob is facing up. And then I'm going to remove the bottom plate of the grinder. There are four Phillips head screws that need to come out in order for me to do that. I've got the four screws, removed. All the electronics are on this bottom panel, so I'm going to be careful with this. And there's a hole cover that I can remove and set aside, and then I'm just going to slide the power switch down. There's a little bit of restriction here because of the cables leading to the electric panel. So I'm just going to carefully move that to the side so that I can then get to the bolts that I need to remove. Starting at the bottom, I'm going to remove these bolts that are screwed into basically little frame bars at the top and bottom of this panel. And these are a ten millimeter hex head. So he need my ratchet. Now that we've gotten the bottom bolts removed, we're going to move to the top. And again, we have four bolts to remove. So I'm gonna get my ratchet to start. And then once I get my bolts loose, I'm going to move to the driver just to make it a little quicker. So we've got all the bolts out and before we completely remove the front panel, I still need to disconnect the shaker plate from the shaker rod. Just remove this Phillips head screw. Okay, Set that aside. Okay. Now I can remove the entire front plate. Now you can see we have pretty good access to the transition tube it’s held in place by two screws that are pressing up against a couple metal washers behind the tube. I'm just going to go ahead and remove the screws, and once I have those out, I can pull the tube out. So when we replace the transitional tube, the part you get will actually be a kit that includes the rubber tube, the two washers that sit back in the base here, two screws, and then a little metal insert piece, all right. So the insert piece goes into the back of the transitional tube. The washers go over in a little ridge at the end and we'll go on from the front of the tube, pull those down. And I’m just going to be careful not to tear or miss-form the tube in this process. All right. So we've gotten the insert and the washers on. I can go ahead and put the tube back into place. If you're having a little trouble getting it in, don't worry, because once you put the screws in, it will pull against the washers and should pull the tube in nice and straight. So now that we replaced the transition tube and inspected the discharge chute, we're going to go ahead and put the grinder back together. Just a quick note. When you're putting the grinder back together, the bars that the bolts attach to are different for the top and bottom. This is for the bottom. And you can see there's a thread insert on the bottom of this bar. That's where the bottom plate of the grinder screws in. This is for the top. You can see there's a threaded insert on the side of the bar and this is where the hopper screws insert.