August 2023

WARNING: I am not a mechanical engineer and this was not created using a cad program. It was drawn in Blender and the parts were fit by 'eye'

Every printer has different tolerances. Every filament behaves differently at different temperatures and speeds. You may have trouble getting this to fit. One day, I hope to be able to resize things for a more engineered fit, but even then, how it comes out will depend on your printer, your filament and settings.

October 2021

Many people have spent the time printing this, only to find that the parts do not fit well due to the differences between printers (over\under extrusion, tolerances, etc).

So I have included a test fit model for you to try the fit first. I have not done this myself, but I would assume that you could scale the inside parts, ever so slightly, to get a good fit for your printer\filament combination.

The six armed section just needs to fit snugly inside the outer ring slots. For the other cross section, you should be able to force it through with a medium amount of force (it is supposed to be tight).

October 2019

I improved the model a bit.

Each printerfilament combination can have different tolerances. Even on my printer, the fit is tight and parts need to be worked back and forth to ease them up.

September 2017

IMHO, this grinder works amazingly well. Put peppercorns in the bottle and snap the cap into place. Tightly hold the top and bottom and twist them back and forth ... fresh ground pepper.

Please read the Post-Printing section below.

Here are some standard 3D printing and food safety things to take note of ...

I would recommend a food safe plastic. PLA is generally regarded as food safe, but I have heard that some PLA filaments have some issues. Please check. ABS is NOT food safe. I have printed PLA and ABS versions of the grinder, and both grind well.

Permeability is a problem. I rinsed one of the prototypes in water and water got inside the print volume. Even after blow drying it, water was still present and caused pepper dust to stick to the parts. Not sanitary. KEEP IT DRY.

PLA is not dishwasher safe.

Even if you keep it dry, all the little bumps and creases are likely nice places for bacteria to grow. So think about how you can deal with that. Perhaps acetone vapor will seal it up, I have not tried that yet.

I have ground a lot of pepper with my prototypes, this design was iteration number 26. After all that pepper grinding I haven't seen any significant damage to the parts. If you are worried, print a version in some gaudy color to see if little plastic bits are getting mixed into all that yummy pepper. Haven't seen any so far.

I will be using this over time to see how things hold up. If you have any suggestions please let me know.

The design is currently not adjustable. I may add adjustability in a future design if everything else works out well. If you print the current design at 90% you will get a finer grind.

As an aside, the guy that sits in the desk next to me is from Thalassery, India. Thalassery used to be called Tellicherry, and his family owns a farm there that grows peppercorns. Sometime the universe truly amazes me.