During my last trip to the Netherlands, I picked up an antique coffee mill that I found at the markets in Delft. I had actually entertained the idea of buying one of these old mills for a while before my trip; I liked the charm of the manual process. Plus, I needed a coffee grinder, and these old mills can be had for cheap. So I found a mill that was in reasonably good condition and bought it with the intention of restoring it.
The first thing I did was replaced the dingy old backing board with something a little more modern and a little less cream-colored. I decided on a simple pattern of walnut and curly maple – I thought the walnut nicely contrasted the color of the mill, while the maple broke it up and kept it from overwhelming the palette. A cove on the edges added a bit of detail, and a bit more on the back edges at top and bottom would allow you to pull it off its mounting surface - wait, what?
I didn’t like the idea of mounting this mill on a wall in my apartment. Furthermore, because I live in an apartment, I didn’t really have a wall to mount it to. The solution? Mount it on the fridge with magnets. I needed some really, really strong magnets to support the weight of the mill, plus the forces of grinding coffee. So I bought some 1X1/8” N52 neodymium magnets which could support 20 lbs each. I recessed these magnets into counterbores in the back surface cut with a forstner bit, and used epoxy to keep them there. While the epoxy was curing, I placed the board magnets-down on a flat surface. This allowed the epoxy to make up for any difference in the depth of the counterbores so all four magnets would sit flush against a mounting surface.
Up next was a thorough cleaning of the mill itself. When I pulled it apart, I found that years of coffee had accumulated in a variety of nooks inside. The milling chamber itself gave refuge to a fair bit of caked-on coffee, but by far the worst was the compacted particulate between the adjustment screw and the inner burr. In fact, I didn’t realize at first that there was anything more than a shallow hole behind the burr. It turned out that this fairly deep hole was filled with coffee dust, which had mingled with grease and become packed into the burr. Gross.
I used wire brushes, a toothbrush, and plenty of soapy water to clean the burrs and the grinding chamber. A soak in vinegar also helped to remove some of the greasy old coffee, and to cut the smell (which was awful, by the way).
The next step was to sand and repaint the mill. This was by far the most time-consuming part of the process, and, unfortunately, I don't have any pictures. Due to all of the curvature, the mill had to be tediously hand-sanded. Moreover, I initially tried to spray paint it. Unfortunately, spray painting on a windy apartment balcony doesn't work very well. So I got to repeat the sanding process several times before I gave up and used a brushed-on enamel instead. Which worked great, by the way.
After than, all that remained was final assembly. And for all that work, I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.
Photo credit: Oliver Kliewe
Note: this post originally appeared on December 27, 2016.