Sounds like you need a micro hopper, possible a lens hood will be sufficient, but you will need to keep it filled to ensure the weight on the beans stays similar. This makes it difficult to puff out grinds, but it's possibly the only alternative to true single dosing.

 

Keeping it filled isn't an option, I have about 4 different beans on the go usually so single dosing is my life! The lens hopper is just big enough for a triple dosing but double is usually what I do in the morning.

Have found some more threads on this and it looks like 55mm is the diameter of the ledge where the three screws from the burrs are, and 37mm is the diameter of the burr opening where the big screw is in the middle. So would a flat 37mm weight be ok or do bad things happen if something contacts that spinning big screw head in the middle?

Will have to experiment with a few things I guess.

 

I'm in the same boat - and haven't really solved it to any reasonable extent. I use a sock with baking beans in it (suggested by jumboratty if I remember correctly) although I'm still not getting consistent results. If you need something that weighs the same and fits at the different levels - it might be an answer for you.

Following with interest though, would love to solve this properly.

 

Why dont you just grind your two doses separately in the morning , one after each other ? So you are only ever single dosing .

Seems like you are trying to find a complicated solution for a simple problem

 

If I can avoid having to load, grind, sweep, etc. everything twice in a row that would be best. Surely a weight that goes down with bean level -- regardless of whether it's 18g of beans or 36g of beans -- isn't that complicated?

 

Indeed..

And the other thing with single dosing for everything is on the other occasions where you have 6 people wanting coffee. Single dosing for them all is a pain and feels like it takes forever.

 

If I can avoid having to load, grind, sweep, etc. everything twice in a row that would be best. Surely a weight that goes down with bean level -- regardless of whether it's 18g of beans or 36g of beans -- isn't that complicated?

Tube with weight .

 

Remembering I had moldable plastic pellets from a previous (non-coffee-related) project, I decided to melt some down and see if I could make a weight that fit properly. I don't have access to a lathe or metalworker... would love to have something like the metal tube with plunger I saw in another thread but alas I don't have the skills or equipment to make it. So plastic it is.

A work in progress at the moment, will post some pics later once I have it "working" to the degree that it's satisfactory enough for my needs.

 

would love to have something like the metal tube with plunger I saw in another thread but alas I don't have the skills or equipment to make it...

Could you link to that thread please? I've had a dig around but can't find it...

 

http://coffeeforums.co.uk/showthread.php?24831-Machined-Mods-Episode-1-Mazzer-Dropper-Hopper-Mod that one.

I've done some double doses with my new plastic weight and it seems to be working fine -- which I define as "both shots have the same pull time and quality" rather than "first shot underextracted, second shot overextracted" which I was getting before with the two doses of beans having different weights (or lack thereof) pushing them through the grinder.

I basically melted some polymorph pellets down and pushed the semi-soft material into the throat with the grinder spinning (so that the nut was spinning around at the top and would leave a round hole rather than a molded hole) and molded it around the edges,pulling up a tab of plastic on one side so I could pull it out and shift it slightly around then press down again. I did this around the whole circumference to create a ledge the whole way around rather than just 3 notches where the burr screw shelves are. As I hadn't used enough pellets to make a solid block and instead pushed a hole in the middle whilst I was molding it around the edges, I then melted some more pellets and filled the hole so it's a solid chunk now.

It seems to move down nicely as the beans go down into the burrs, though if it starts to catch on the way down I will shave off some plastic from the outer circumference. I don't know if the problem of catching a few stray beans between the weight and the burrs will ever be solved but this does 95% of what I need so I'm happy enough with that. Ugly but cheap and handy. Total weight is 115g which seems heavy enough.

If someone were selling machined weights like in the dropper hopper thread, I would happily buy one though!

 

Thanks mshole. Yup - @risky 's is gorgeous. I'd buy one too.

 

Why dont you just grind your two doses separately in the morning , one after each other ? So you are only ever single dosing .

Seems like you are trying to find a complicated solution for a simple problem

+1 That's exactly what I used to do when single dosing.