Stand Still

I'm at a coffee stand still and I'm a little upset, but I'll get over it. Fresh Roast must have sent an entirely new base unit in the mail to me because my roasting chamber does not fit into this base the way it did into the one I sent back. I did one roast I think on Wednesday and it was already at 1st crack in less than 2 minutes and the entire roast was done in less then 5 minutes. I noticed the fan was not strong at all. Using the Sweet Maria's tip sheet, I made the fan stronger. Tried another roast today, and again, even with tipping, my 65 gms of green beans did not want to move. I ended up manually stirring them for the first minute or so, and by that point they were ok, but chaff was all over the place. Did my usual stopping the roast for 30 seconds every 2 minutes or so for the first 6 minutes, but again, the roast was very rapid and I had to pull the entire roast at 7 minutes. Prior to this I would stop my roasts from anywhere from 9 minutes to 11 minutes. Now I have to start the whole process over and possibly make more modifications, most likely in batch size. That, or send the whole roaster back again. My fan could have died before because it was too strong, but at the same time it was perfect for my needs, in terms of quantity and timing. I was just getting comfortable with the timing of the roaster.

In the mean time, I picked up a West Bend Poppery II at a thrift store in my search for a cheap convection oven top to make a SC/CO. I turned the popper on, and the fan worked well but it didn't seem to generate much heat. Opened up the bottom and the wire to the main heating element is disconnected. I'll probably solder the wire to where it should be in the next day or two and try this set up verses the Fresh Roast next roast day if its cool enough.

My Ethiopian Sidamo and Harrar are also not here yet, they are somewhere either in the USPS system or possibly was a miscommunication and was not sent yet. I was really looking forward to that too :(

So all in all a bad coffee day.

On a better note, I'm making a 3-D crystal chihuahua for a friend who works at the bead shop I go to. She had a pretty bad stroke a couple months back and I've been meaning to make this since she fell ill. Hopefully I'll have it done by my class at the bead shop on Friday. I'm so excited because I haven't taken a bead class yet at this shop, and I finally jumped in. I'm taking a beginning glass fusing class. I'll definitely take pictures.