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Permalink Reply by Mike Sabol on September 3, 2010 at 2:07pm

It's something you could certainly try. There is plenty of room on either side of the grind chamber inside the case for some fans. Another idea would be to surrond the grind chamber with plastic and create a chimney and blow fresh air over the chamber and out through an exaust. The point of the plastic would be to direct the airflow more precisely. How are you going to cut the case for the intake/exaust ports? That stainless can be really difficult to work with. You might have to drill multiple holes that are close together. I'd make the fan run all the time. No downside to that.

Another aspect of the GR series would be batch size consistancy. Worth a look.

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Permalink Reply by Daniel King Pizzutti on September 3, 2010 at 3:54pm

You could always try to inter-cool it like a lot of hardcore PC gamers do with there rigs.

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Permalink Reply by Simon Ouderkirk on September 4, 2010 at 7:58am

I was thinking having a local machine shop drill out a circular shape of smaller holes using a drill press - should be easy and would keep it safe. I know that there is room, and that it is possible - but is it sensible? Would it reduce the heat enough to have a positive impact on flavor, or just be a (cool looking) waste of time?

I had thought about water-cooling the whole thing, but it would end up being more expensive, and I am somewhat averse to having running water in a potentially-leaking series of tubes inside a water-sensitive device that costs more than my car. Thinking about CPU overclocking is what got me on the cool-off-the-grinder kick in the first place!

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Permalink Reply by Daniel King Pizzutti on September 4, 2010 at 3:28pm

I understand your logic, but the comps probably cost just as much as the grinder. And I don't believe that it's common for malfunctions to happen. Regardless, I was just having fun with the topic. lol

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Permalink Reply by ryan mcdougall on September 20, 2010 at 9:08am

a pair of heatsinks might work. They can be mounted on the back and will pull the heat away from the inside of the machine by giving it more surface area to be distributed to. A quick search of "large machine heatsinks" turned up two results worth mentioning. http://www.accelthermal.com/index.php?page_id=133
and http://www.magntek.com/items/12to220.htm

water-cooled could be easy if you knew how to braise copper tubing around your motor and build a timer circuit with a relay that turns on when you hit the grinder and stays on for a few minutes afterword. All the parts and schematics are available online. The copper tubing could wrap around your motors, then leave the machine and form an up and down or side to side formation where the heat would dissipate into the air and then go into a pump that would pump the cooled water back toward the motors. Some water pumps for espresso machines use the same kind of technology. This can probably be found online somewhere. It's exactly like a radiator on a car or a radiator heater that you see in old buildings.

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Permalink Reply by Bill Warnock on October 5, 2010 at 8:01pm

this grinder is a bioch for heat and that grinder head was just recently redesigned(where you adj the coarseness) although its a $500 part try pulling the front off and cleaning it out as its a prone grinder to clog only thing that'll help is the fans as mentioned or get the top of the line auto bunn grinder its awesome.

i really dont like the Gr series grinders if i seem biased. but then again i dont really like auto grinders either.

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Permalink Reply by Simon Ouderkirk on October 6, 2010 at 4:32am

BW: Looking at the Bunn web site, I like the look of their auto grinder, especially as it doses by weight (!) rather than the FetCo's timer, which I find I'm forever tweaking. I'm going to thumb through their spec sheets later today, but how do they manage heat in a superior way?

Right now I'm thinking of using an integrated fan/heat sink from tigerdirect, machining it if necessary to put it right against the grinder chamber, and rig the power source such that it blows when the grinder is on. Hopefully the vibration of the grind chamber won't cause too much trouble in keeping the heat sink attached.

Hypothesis: Getting the heat sink to sit flush against the grinder chamber will be the biggest headache of all time.

If this turns out to be the case, I may turn to fans alone, and place one on both the left and right sides of the grinder's outer walls.

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