Weird rocketry

If you’re a coffee fan like me, it’s inevitable that at some point in your coffee-making experience you’ll find yourself in a desperate need of burr grinder. The problem with burr grinders is that the majority of them are too expensive for an average home coffee-maker and are targeted towards restaurants and professional baristas.

Hence, you’ll start exploring more cheap alternatives — and the first pretty affordable models will be blade-based.
These type of grinders suck as they do not provide you with a decent quality ground coffee –resulting bean particles are not evenly sized and this will highly affect espresso taste.

As you’ll discover later, there are not many burr-based grinders priced less than 50$. Surprisingly, they will produce almost the same quality of ground coffee as expensive monsters with prices over 300$. In this article, we’ll review one of those cheap coffee grinders and tune it to produce high quality ground coffee.

Main controls

Device is equipped with two controls:

• timer
• burr tuner

The first one controls for how long your grinder will work and hence, how much ground coffee it will produce. The burr tuner controls the size of ground coffee particles and it varies from coarse to super fine. This is typically where the problem arises, as it is highly likely that switching it into super fine position will yield coffee particles that are way too large in size for good espresso. This means that you need to disassemble your device and tune burr manually.

Fuses

To avoid accidentally turning on your grinder, the designers of this home appliance invented a number of fuses in the form of small plastic buttons:

• 2 fuses are located at the bottom and top of ground coffee tray
• the last one is at the border of top cover

The device won’t work until both tray and top cover are tightly installed. Before making yourself upset and asking for warranty make sure these fuses are pressed, since there may be a small amounts of coffee particles which will prevent them from being on during frequent usage.

Disassembly

To take device apart you’ll need

• plastic opening tools
• a screwdriver

To get access to burr tuning mechanism you’ll need to take off top grey cover which is held by 5 plastic clips shown by red arrows above. Take patience, since you’ll probably need a lot of hard force to take it apart — make sure using plastic opening tools to not scratch plastic case and void your warranty.

Next, you’ll need a screwdriver to tune burr position:

The plastic wheel(shown by green arrow) which controls the distance between the burrs has a small protective ledge, which allows it to rotate only 180 degrees. You need to detach it from main wheel and make one full rotation counterclockwise. Make sure that main outer burr control will be in coarse position.

Assemble everything once again and find the best position of burr which will yield you decent quality grind.

Sources

Camry CR 4439 product page
Inspirational video of similar Delonghi KG79 disassembly