Iroast Mod- additional airflow and catch the chaff

I figured the time has come to try this media....and since someone from SweetMaria's Homeroaster List was interested in seeing pics of my Most UnSophisticated IRoast Mod..I decided to post them here and invite the bloke over for a look.

My Iroast was roasting at six minutes no matter what i did to try to program lower temps. I new that airflow was a key factor here..and the chaff collector was a key element.

If I was going increase airflow and allow the chaff more freedom to get distanced from the roasting chamber i would need a new chaff collecting system.

Thanks to the kindness of Ivo van der Putten from Holland I got some extra parts that allowed me to "moddle" a bit..(That's a cross between modify and muddle).

INCREASING AIR-FLOW

My first move was to remove the screen from the plastic cover of the roaster to allow a release chaff. This would give me two options.

Firstly to remove the "metal chaff collector insert" altogether- allowing maximum airflow, (allowing chaff to simply flow through) and eliminating most reflected heat. I figured i could now begin to program at higher temperatures and begin to control my roasts.

Secondly, a far less extreme possibility: The IRoast was known for its loose fitting "metal chaff collector/insert" that caused a problem of chaff clogging the screen on the plastic cover. By undoing my fix of that problem the metal insert was once again loose, creating somwhat more airflow. The chaff that normally clogged just could simply flow into the new chaff collector.

CATCHING THE CHAFF

I had gone to the Kibbutz Junkyada (That's "Hebrew" for the yard where all sorts of useful junk can be found) where I picked up some window screen and steel wire to make a sleeve to catch the chaff. I cut it to wide enough to wrap around the Vent Connector supplied with the Iroast, allowing enough material to create an ovelapping edge of two inches.

Wrapping the netting around the Vent Connector ,I tightly attached it with a plastic tie wrap/tie lock.

Although made of plastic this plastic strip has withstood tens of roasts and is doing fine..

The Vent connector has four protruding metal "legs" that neatly fit into matching holes on the plastic cover.

I used the metal wire to "sew" the screen sleeve closed. A vertical wire placed at the along the two inch overlap insures that the sleeve remains closed enough for the chaff to remain inside and also provides a "backbone" to hold the sleeve upright and firm.

The top of the sleeve was folded over with a short wire threaded through to keep it closed.

This is how the contraption looks put together.

My roasts became quite long..12 minutes and more..and i had an inkling that all this air-flow could be doing some damage alongside the benefits. The IRoast was also more effected by ambient temperature than ever and it seemed that the roasts were not really finishing off, but just dragging on and on..kinda like this blog entry.

So I dreamt of a more sophisticated solution...like a disc i could rotate or flip to control airflow...(from my work until now, you can see that this amount of sophistication would be beyond me)...as i dreamt i continued to roast with my lengthy full air flow roasts until one day my roaster died on me. (Because of the lengthy full air flow roasts or just coincidental??)

I stopped dreaming and decided, for the time being, to doing something simple.

I drilled some holes in the metal chaff collector to allow more airflow. These holes do get partially clogged with chaff, but my roasts entered the 8-10 minute range. I finally began to feel that my roasts are becoming more controllable.

I have another metal chaff screen that is being punched with larger openings to solve the problems of those beans whose chaff "overclog" the present system and still roast too quickly.

While my roasts are consistently better than they've been in the past, I am hoping that the Iroast is not being overworked dueto the mod.

As i end my first (and last?) entry, I see that Blogs can create more chaff than dried processed Yemen's!