Coffee Grinder Resurrection
Dissassembley in progress
I used to grind my coffee with a hand mill. 5 minutes of mindfulness. It's a process, I said. Then I got a coffee grinder. 15 seconds of brain holiday ✌️ Never looked back.
Like many kitchen utilities, it's basically just a motor so I didn't expect this to ever fail. When mine started stalling and stopping I was a bit miffed. A search came up with a video from someone who had the same fault, a broken power capacitor. Well at leastI might be able to repair this thing!
First Attempt, or "Too Easy"
I bought a pair of replacement caps off ebay, there were 2 common footprints for the part, and since it was a cheap part I just guessed. Lo and behold, the new cap was too big. It was the right spec so I yoloed it and soldered it onto the board anyway, left the casing open, powered it on... Success!
I hastily reassembled it. The oversized capacitor snagged on the case and ripped itself off the PCB, along with some of the traces from the board. I tried turning it on again ...yeah that didn't work did it, it doesn't run on magic 😂 The disappointment was brutal.
Second Attempt, or "Repairing the repair with a replacement part in need of a repair"
I took the lazy option at this point and opted to replace the board itself, although the trace was probably repairable, I didn't have the knowledge or patience to figure out the circuit diagram. I looked for another broken grinder on ebay and found a control board up for spares and repairs. I didn't know what condition it was in, but hoped that at worst it had the same fault, so I ordered some smaller replacement caps at the same time.
Transferred the motor to the control board and plugged it in. Same exact fault 🙌 Swapped the cap out, soldered it in cleanly, and voila, it works. Second time lucky! 😅 This time I was way more careful with reassembly.
Take aways:
- Go slow to go fast. Rushing cost me time, wrong part, torn circuit, be patient.
- Keep moving when things go wrong. Sometimes it felt like I was moving backwards but it's worth sticking with it
- Repairing stuff is immensely satisfying. Saving it from landfill made the effort worthwhile.
Source for original repair video: