Popcorn Popper -> Coffee Roaster v.2
So, I had a pretty tragic senior moment not so long ago. It involved my old coffee roaster and the pressure of a large backlog of pending roasts right before leaving for vacation. I setup my trusty (if ugly as hell) modded popcorn popper, plugged everything in, and went back in the house to pickup my first batch of greens. I returned to find an acrid puff of smoke rising from the roaster. One glance at the control panel betrayed my clumsiness...I had accidentally flipped on the heating element (but not the fan) as I was getting up. Heating sans fan is not good for plastic, for those of you who may be wondering. Long story short, my fan had turned into a smelly lump of blackened plastic that spun all-at-once around the shaft with a "Whump!-Whump!-Whump!" sort of noise when it was turned on. Needless to say, the relatives went without homeroast this visit.
When I got back last week, I decided to make some changes. I'd actually spent quite a bit of time over vacation dreaming up some plans for a new roaster, one that would handle any requests from friends along with my own supply with ease. However, since this new design involved a reciprocating saw and an old Weber charcoal grill, I decided I'd also need to make a new popper-roaster to tide me over.
This new roaster takes advantage of all the things I've learned over 18 months of popper roasting. It also squeezes a little more juice out of the fan motor by "overclocking" it with 26V instead of the factory-default 12V (the previous incarnation of the popper-roaster used 20V delivered by way of a scrounged laptop power supply). I've done three test roasts and two that I'd call "production quality" with this new roaster, and I'm actually pretty proud of the way it came out. I'm using entirely off-the-shelf components now (no more one-of-a-kind scrounged parts), which means I can show others how to make one just like it.
Maybe someday if I get motivated enough, I'll put together a shopping list an set of assembly instructions for the popper-roaster. There is an abundance of information on modding poppers online, but most of these seem to say that you need to find a special, vintage version of the popper (Poppery, for instance), because apparently they just don't make 'em like they used to. I can tell you that this is bunk; my Target special actually outperforms the Poppery II that I'd modded along the way.
Until such a time as I can tell the whole story of how to modify a Target popcorn popper to become a precision micro-batch coffee roaster, you'll have to be satisfied with photo gallery.
Technorati Tags: coffee, fabrication, roasting