pretend that you care

last night i drilled a hole in smokey's lid to insert a thermometer. this allows me to monitor the roast, and if i want to get really fancy (i do!) i can adjust temperature throughout by turning smokey off or fiddling with the variac (dubbed 'constantine' by a coworker).

that went well with no loss of life, limb, or liberty.

i fired off two roasts and was pleased to discover that things were happening at about the right temperatures -- in other words, my thermometer is more or less accurate.

then i disassembled the poor git to see if i could figure out how to rewire the fan so that it plugs directly into the wall, bypassing the variac. this way i can have constant (read: high) fan speed regardless of the heating element voltage. whelp, i saw a resistor or something and screamed in horror, screwing smokey back together as fast as possible.

my coffee roaster is not what i want to be using to learn about electronics.

as i put him back together, i noticed that the glass roasting chamber was starting to separate from the metal base. ugh. i may be able to repair it, i may need to buy a new one, or maybe i can just ignore it if it doesn't amount to heat loss and fire hazards.

i called the mfr this morning to find out. i think it's just one dude in a warehouse (awesome! i want that job) and he'll (hopefully) call me back.

digging thru my email to find if smokey is still under warranty, i discovered that he's not - i got him waaaay back in july last year and he only has 6 months of warranty on the roasting chamber. nuts.

i'm considering moving to a SC/CO setup, but that requires patio roasting which is... unpleasant. plus, it uses much larger batch sizes. i enjoy being able to switch coffees 2-3 times a week, which i wouldn't get to do with a bigger batch size.

unless i started drinking it at work.

i'd like to do that but it's a hassle to stand around and brew and clean and so forth while cow-orkers pass by and grab their free "lattes" from the crappy superauto.