It’a detained by magnets so it doesn’t get in the basket and interfere with spreading out the grounds. Needs a clean up with a lick of sandpaper, pretty stupid but these things cost like 50 bucks /shrug
EDIT: appreciate all the concern for my health, it touches dry coffee grounds. I agree that if it got wet there’d be health problems but unless it gets real humid there’s just no opportunity for decay. As for random leaching same diff, without heat and wet it’s not really a concern.
That said I probably will seal an improved design, this is just a test piece.
Please keep in mind that you need to seal that print before you use it with food. Because of the layers, there’s are a ton of places for dirt and bacteria to hide that are impossible to clean. Additionally, depending on what kind of nozzle you used, heavy metals can end up in your print which you don’t want to then leech into your coffee. General advice is to just not use 3d prints first good, but if you really want to you should coat them in a food safe epoxy before using.
This is good advice.
On the bright side for OP, his part should (hopefully) only come into contact with dry coffee grounds so some of those concerns are lessened.
In other applications – sealant or not – I can only imagine pouring hot coffee over a PLA part would not be a recipe for success…
3D printed parts are NOT food safe.
So usually id agree that 3d prints shouldn’t be used for food, but this is a coffee hopper, they’re made from plastic already and I guarantee you the ones we used at Starbucks didn’t get that clean either, it’s fine, just sand it and get rid of those hairs
3d printing vs injection molding is a huge difference, so it’s not fair to say “they are both made of plastic”.
It’s also not taking a huge amount of friction either, it’s literally just a hopper, walls to gravity feed the shelled beans into the grinder, sometimes it’s okay to step away from the rules a bit and just go, that’ll be fine
“rules” are there for a reason. But hey, it’s your health and safety, do whatever you want.
Yes but common sense is also there for a reason, I would absolutely trust this material to handle very light duty tasks like this. There is a difference between following rules within the boundaries of common sense and spouting them off in any tangentially related scenario without having done any testing yourself or even seeing the product in action. There is simply no way to definitively say “this is a bad idea” without doing microbe tests and comparing it to baseline levels after a period. I think people tend to jump on the not food safe bandwagon a little too readily in this community and I’d rather not see this place become like an average reddit hobby ground
Yeah you need moisture for decay. Tiny fines might eventually go rancid in tiny pores and taste or smell a little bad but idk. She’ll be right.
Like it’s not like I clean the burrs that grind the beans much so if rotting was a problem I’d be dead already.
A lighter will tidy up the stringing without making the mess that sandpaper will. Just don’t linger too long or the part will warp. It should take less than a second to make the strings disappear with a lighter.
Hot a air station, if you have one, will also do wonders here. I suspect an adjustable hot air gun would also probably work, but those things can put out some serious heat so be careful.
I actually use a Lexivon torch, and move quickly. Lots of heat in a precise location for a short amount of time.
How does it do with fine grounds and static? IIRC one of the reasons for magnets is to fight static cling from the finer bits.
