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Coffee Grinder Resurrection

Dissassembley in progress

I used to grind my coffee with a hand mill. 5 minutes of mindfulness, or so I'd tell myself. It's a process, I said. Then one day I got a coffee grinder. 15 seconds of brain holiday ✌️ Never looked back.

Like many kitchen utilities, it's basically a spinning magnet with one moving part. I didn't expect this to fail. When mine started stalling and stopping, I was confused. A quick search came up with other people who had had the same fault, and it turned out to be a power capacitor. I might actually 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 I hadn't actually opened the thing up at this point so since it was a cheap part I just guessed. The new cap was too big, but I figured, it's the right spec, why not give it a shot anyway? I soldered it onto the board, left the casing open, powered it on... Success! That was so simple!

In my excitement I hastily reassembled the gadget. The oversized capacitor snagged on the case and ripped itself off the PCB, along with some of the track on the board. I tried turning it on again ...yeah that didn't work did it, it doesn't run on magic 😂 Absolutely 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 track was probably repairable, I didn't have the knowledge or patience to figure out the circuit diagram. So I looked for another broken grinder on ebay. 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: