Ditting KR1203/KR1403 Maintenance | Rotational Carrier Removal & Felt Ring Replacement

Mar 29th 2023 Written by John Erler

Transcript

Hi, I’m John with Prima Coffee and today we're going to talk about how to remove the rotational carrier on the 1203 and 1403 Ditting grinder and to change the felt ring.

All right, before we get started, you need to access the grind chamber of which you can see how to do from our previous video on basic cleaning and maintenance of the grind chamber. Again, I have a motor pulled out so we can get some better shots of what we do to remove the rotational carrier. Before I start on that, I'm going to adjust my grind adjustment to be fairly coarse setting. If it's on the finer side of things, you're going to have some tension below the rotational carrier and we just don't want to damage anything, loosen the gear or remove the gear completely. Sometimes you can just spin the gear out, cone gear itself without any problem. If the brass piece on this extension gear won't move out, you can get a wrench in behind the inside of the collar here and loosen it a little bit. And it should just spin out for you. The next thing we need to do is we need to remove the burr inside. I use a sharpie here to keep the rotational carrier from spinning while I'm unscrewing stuff. Generally, this is nice because it's strong enough to hold against the force but not rigid enough to do a lot of damage to your transitional carrier or anything inside the grind chamber. Got that set up and now I'm going to remove my burr screws. So once we do that, we can remove our rotational burr and just clean it up a little bit. Okay, and I'm going to do the same thing so that I can get the bolt out that sits in the middle, that holds the rotational carrier in place and to do that, I'm going to use this 13 millimeter socket head. This is a little easier when the motor is attached inside the grinder body, you get a little more resistance and i’m going to pull that out and so basically I have the bolt, the lock washer and the carrier washer, take our Sharpie out, and then we're going to move to our flange puller or gear puller or steering wheel puller. Basically what this does is it gives us up to four and a half inches across here to set these bolts. These are six millimeter bolts, 80 millimeters long. Same thread as the burr screws. I'm going to take this and I'm going to screw the bolts in. And you can see I have the nuts at the bottom there. The reason I have those is it kind of gives me like a stop point that I can tighten. Cause I don't really want those bolts to be loose and moving around inside of the of the screw holes as much as I can prevent them from doing so. It may be a little more complicated to get in here and do this with with the motor inside. So I have these set. I probably go in about half an inch with the screws. You don't want to go too far. And then I've moved the center bolt down so that my assembly is tight. The idea is we're going to push down with the center bolt. The puller is going to pull up with the force of this being screwed in and it's going to pop out the rotational carrier. Here I've got a three quarter ratchet that I can fit on top, and then I'm going to tighten my middle bolt. Before I do that, I'm going to insert my Sharpie so I can keep my rotational carrier from moving. Scares me every time. But that's the sound that it makes when the carrier pops out. So now what we have is the rotation rotational carrier removed and we can see the felt ring. What happens with the felt ring is over time it can get fairly rigid due to coffee oils and coffee fines. Sometimes it can split, allowing fines in coffee to get down into the base of the grinder. If the physical rotation of the carrier is definitely restricted or you're getting a ton of coffee in the bottom of your grinder, that means you’ve got to change this felt ring. This is a new felt ring. So I'm not going to take this off, but I'll show you what you would get is just basically this felt ring and it's pretty self-explanatory. You pull this one off, but the other one on. And the one thing to note is before you reinstall this into the motor, I like to put a little bit of mineral oil or any sort of natural lubricant so that this moves smoothly when it's inserted back in the grinder. Also, before I put this back in, I'm just going to look inside to see if everything looks good inside and I'm just going to wipe out some of these coffee grounds, try to prevent them from getting down into the bottom of the grinder if you can. And so ideally, this is new clean and lubricated and then we'll just place it back in to the grinder. Now, I don't have to do anything really special to get this fitted back in right. What I'm going to do is remove the puller and I'm going to find our center bolt, Place that back in. I'm going to grab my Sharpie again and I'm going to take my 13 millimeter ratchet and I'm just going to tighten it into place until it's snug. I take my sharpie out and see that my rotational carrier moves evenly and smoothly inside the grinder chamber. I'm John with Prima Coffee and thanks again for watching.