@3aan schreef:In Italie wordt ook zat koffie Bagger gemaakt, je vergeet voor het gemak het vakantiegevoel, net zo als dat lekkere vriendinnetje wat je helemaal plat gen...t hebt, als je die een paar maanden erna ziet, dan schrik je . . .?

Die koffie is steevast veel te donker en met veel robusta erin gebrand.

cremalover schreef:Waarom branden ze in Italie de koffie te donker?

The price hike comes after a five year block on coffee prices,

Voor een espresso aan de bar betaalde je in Italië recent gemiddeld 80 cent. Maar als gevolg van de stijgende koffieprijzen kost een espresso momenteel gemiddeld 1 euro. Volgens Stoppani zullen niet veel bareigenaren geneigd zijn de prijs van een espresso nog verder verhogen dan de psychoogische drempel van 1 euro.

cremalover schreef:Gister wat Malabar in de brander gedaan en ik weet dat de meesten die wat lichter prefereren maar ik heb hem ruim in de tweede crack laten komen en ja hij glimt een beetje maar krijg er wel een smile van op mijn toeter.
Dus wat is te donker?

WHY DOES IT TAKE SO LONG TO BUILD AN ESPRESSO MACHINE?
In November, when we last built 8 machines, it took one person 5 full time days to build one Decent Espresso machine.

There are a few reasons why this was the case with that November design, :

each building step was sequential, you had to do one, to do the next. That's slow.
physical access to the machine wasn't easy as things got packed into a small space
many steps were fiddly and required time to get right, such as mounting the steam wand through the faceplate in a way that was tight and not leaking when steaming
there were a lot of steps and many weren't easy, some requiring quite a bit of dexterity and assembly experience.
For these reasons, and also because I felt the design of the internals was lacking the refinements that were needed, I sacked my mechanical engineer in January, hired a new one, and we've spent the past 4 months totally redoing the internal design to fix these issues.

With the new design:

there are a half dozen sub-assembles, which are clusters of components that can be built ahead of time, and tested separately too.
getting into the machine is much easier, because there are panels where things mount that are removed from the machine, and screwed in at the end
hopefully, most of the fiddly, hard-to-get-right problems are fixed
We're estimating that each machine will take a full person's day to make.

WHEN WE TRANSITION TO BUILDING MACHINES:

Some facts to bear on our transition to manufacturing:

We're currently an R&D company, and we have zero "factory workers" on staff who might build machines. To fix this, we're planning on hiring 8 Mechanical Engineering students as summer interns to build machines with us from June 1 to August 30. That gets us "smart people" to build the machines, and 3 months to transition to less highly qualified staff to be building them. I'm also hoping that these students will, by virtue of their studies, have insights for design improvements.
Our office/R&D space (3200 sq ft) is almost totally full at the moment. We have another 2500 sq ft of warehousing, but that's full now too with parts. Why so much space? Because when you order a part (say, tablets) you have to order the minimum order quantity (1000 of them) and they show up in boxes, stacked up on pallets. You have to store them, and they take a lot of space. In June, we're taking out a lease on another 3500 sq ft, directly opposite our front door (6 ft away) and if orders start coming in over the summer, we're also going to take a lease out on another 6000 sq ft (around the corner). We're pretty organised, but it will take a bit of time to fit out the new spaces.
We don't yet have all the parts in stock, and some will certainly take longer to arrive than others. To work around this, we'll start building and testing sub-assemblies in quantity=200, so that when the parts all finally arrive, we're mostly done.
Each espresso machine will be tested for 3 days before it ships: 24 hours on a shipping simulator machine, and then 48 hours of constantly making espresso and steam. This should expose most problems.

WHAT TAKES SO LONG TO BUILD A DECENT ESPRESSO MACHINE?

Building an espresso machine is similar to building a Tower PC clone machine. You buy parts, you put them into a chassis. However, there is one big difference: with a PC clone, all the parts come ready to be screwed in. With our espresso machine, lots of parts come and require more work from us before we can use them.

AN EXAMPLE: THE HEATER SUB-ASSEMBLY

We have two heaters in each machine (espresso and steam) and here are the steps for getting one heater ready:

Put a temperature probe bead in the center hole, and back fill it with thermal putty
Screw in two thermal fuses for CE compliance
Screw in one thermostat for UL compliance
Use pliers to connect locking power cables to fuse 1, to fuse 2, to thermostat, to electrical in, and also to ground
Place entire heater (with all the fittings) suspended in a 3D printed mould of our own design
Fill the mould with quick drying liquid silicone. Wait 30 minutes to dry. Remove and use a knife to clean up stray silicone. Let it further dry another 2 hours.
Slide two two teflon tubes into the two water connectors (in/out) and use pliers to force in a tiny clip to hold them in place
Put a cable tie into a teflon tube and wrap it around the heater, and then tie it to a metal panel
Hook up the water lines to a water pressure line, and test under 15 bar for leaks
Hook up the electrical lines to power, flow water at a known rate, and test that water is being heated at the rate expected
Repeat again 399 times to make enough heaters for the 200 espresso machines that have already been ordered.
Lots of steps! However, this approach is a good one because:

It's a major component and it can be built and tested totally independently from the rest of the espresso machine
It can be done in quantity, alone, so the people doing it can do it faster.
If we can guarantee quality, we can sub-contract out this assembly in the future. However, it has so many steps, and so many ways to screw up, and it is so vital a part, that for now we prefer to assemble it ourselves.
SO: WHY OCTOBER TO RECEIVE MY MACHINE?

Firstly: because there are 200 people ahead of you in the queue, and if we make 4 machines a day, it will take us 50 work days to build them, which is about 2 1/2 months on a 5 day work week. We're ordering parts now, but realistically most of them won't arrive until the end of June, and no espresso machine can leave here until every last part is in stock.

Secondly: we don't yet know how many man hours it will take to build a machine. We estimate it around 1 man day at the moment. If we can reduce that to half a day, that doubles our production speed. I don't think we can reduce it much below that, however, unless we contract out parts of our subassembly to other factories (effectively adding manpower).

Thirdly: we need to hire a lot of people, train them, and have good processes for them to follow. If we do this too fast, we'll have bad staff, poorly trained, with bad processes.

Fourthly: the order backlog is growing each week, and each new order goes to the back of the line.


TO CONCLUDE

This summer, we'll be making espresso machines.

However, we can't go from "no machines per day with no factory workers" to "40 workers and 40 machines a day" in one step. Hiring and training and process-making will be incremental.

We can't afford to sign leases for 3200 sq ft + 2500 sq ft + 3500 sq ft + 6000 sq ft (4 leases) unless we have some idea of demand. Growing capacity too fast is a good way to go bust.

I expect that this summer, if our espresso machines are well reviewed, that orders will increase. We have a plan to cope with that demand, which you've read above. But, it will take a few months for us to deploy that plan.

If you've been reading this forum for a while, one fact should have popped out at you: EVERYTHING DEPENDS ON INITIAL REVIEWS. That's why we're moving slowly, to ensure that from the very beginning, the machines that people receive are good, and people are pleased.

In practical terms, what I expect is that if our espresso machines are well received, that they will be in short supply (like any popular new product) for the first 6 months, as we grow capacity to meet that demand.

I hope this (too long) answer was interesting, and I'm happy to answer any questions.

John Buckman
Decent Espresso CTO