Very rarely have I ever been at a loss for....

It seems like my Krups KM7000 coffeemaker just doesn’t like me. Maybe it’s because I bad-mouth it all the time. This time around, the coffeemaker stopped grinding beans. I had noticed that each day it was grinding fewer and fewer beans for about a week until it completely stopped altogether. Well, far be it for me to NOT do anything about it so once again I had to bust the coffee machine apart. Since this time it was the grinder that was busted, I started my disassembly at the bean hopper. Here's how I did it.

1. I had to first mill my own triangular shaped bit to get at the 4 tamper-proof screws up top.

2. Unsnap the top plastic cosmetic ring off, revealing the 3 phillips screws holding the grinder to the rest of the coffee maker. Remove these 3 screws.

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3. Lift up the entire grinder unit out (it'll still be connected by wires to the innards of the coffeemaker). There will be two screws underneath that hold the top black plastic rotating ring to the rest of the housing. Remove them.

4. Remove the black plastic rotating ring connected to the center white plastic piece. Since this controls the grinding size, try to position it in a way that you can get it back into the same position. This plastic piece is held into place by three clear plastic clips as shown by arrows. I used pliers held against the inner plastic ring to grip the clips and wiggle them out. You might have a better solution than me.

4. After removing the ring, I saw the problem. The outer grinder should be connected to the white ring removed in step 3. This outer grinder remains stationary while the inner grinder rotates during operation. Since there's no user-serviceable way to daily clean the grinder, beans have gotten EVERYWHERE. In my case here, there were so many bean bits strewn about that the outer portion of the grinder (blue arrow) had gotten stuck and disconnected itself from the white plastic piece. I used a shopvac to clean out all of these beans. Then I reconnected the outer grinder back on the bottom of the white plastic ring. There are two screws that hold the grinder piece onto the plastic ring. If the plastic is deformed from the grinder disconnecting itself, then you'll have to find some other way to reconnect them together.

5. Clean up as much beans as possible. Sad to say, the design quality is so poor that you do end up getting beans everywhere after continued use. Re-assembly is in the reverse order of assembly.

My experience has now shown that Krups has tried to convey an aura of "no maintenance required" for their high end coffee machine, at the expense of low product life. What this disassembly really shows is that this aura is pieced together by a poor design quality which cannot be made up for with their 12-month warranty. Even if they replace your coffeemaker within the warranty period, it is only a matter of time until the design flaw seen here will resurface again.

So my coffeemaker broke again, this time something completely unrelated to the previous problems, but that's a story for another time. This time I needed a tool to get at these triangle shaped screw heads. These are made to be tamper-proof so that the average Joe can't open up their own coffeemaker, Nintendo DS, Roomba vacuum, various Happy Meal toys and many other things.

Neither Sears or Home Depot carried stuff like this which makes tampering with these tamper-proof products slightly more difficult. Security through obscurity, I suppose. The screwbits for this kind of screw head can only be mail-ordered (like from McMaster-Carr).  No worries though. I busted out my trusty Dremel and shaved down an old allen key. After some trial and error, I had a nice little tool to fit the triangle.

This morning we woke up and decided to have breakfast at Flip Happy Crepes, one of the many food trailers in town. It became the beginning of a very relaxing day. The weather this morning was gorgeous. Sitting outside with my lovely wife while eating crepes is gonna be my new thing now:)

Afterwards we went over to my parents house to pick up some stuff, and a little time hanging out with them. Then it was off to Home Depot where we ran into the Blackwell family, just chilling at the 'Depot. Came home, ate lunch, then I went with Oliver to help some friends move a washer/dryer up 3 flights of stairs while the ladies stayed in and relaxed. Went to the good ole HEB so that Carolyn could get more sushi... the chefs there are starting to recognize her... and then came home.

We're playing the waiting game these days, trying to have patience for Baby Su to come soon. It's a bit unnerving because we know the baby will come ANY day now , but it's never TO-day. It's okay. Its caused us not to make any long-term plans so we've got days like this where we just play it by ear.