The Great Expobar Grinder Refurb
This page documents the complete refurbishment of a Cunill (Expobar) commercial coffee bean grinder. Purchased from Facebook Marketplace for £80 the machine is in reasonable condition and appears to be working. I don’t believe it has seen much maintenance through its life, and there is evidence of enormous build up of coffee oils and grinds throughout the internals of the machine.
The Expobar Grinder is manufactured in Spain by Cunill and generally considered a very high quality well build machine capable of heavy use. The 60mm burrs effortlessly grind coffee to an extremely fine grind, containing a large 275w AC motor.
The aim of this refurbishment is to entirely strip the machine, clean, replace consumable parts/burrs and rebuild, with a newly painted white body.
Below are a series of photographs and captions of progress so far.
The Hopper Mount / Adjuster. This grinder features a fine tuning thumb screw for unlimited grind settings. Other similar grinders are often 'stepped' making finding the exact grind difficult.
The top Burr is screwed directly to the cap of the grinder. See below for underside view.
The bottom view of the top burr. Elvis the Kitten getting involved in all new projects.
The next difficulty was removing the grinds bin/dispenser. The mechanism is secured by three screws. The top two screwed were seized in and attempting to remove these Allen key bolts risked rounding off the heads. Rotating them half a turn allowed a pair of pliers to do the rest of the job. These will be replaced on reassembly.
The grind dispenser on this machine is short leading to less wasted grinds between grind and grind collector. This prevents stale beans being collected, or the need for excessive 'purging' of beans before dispensing. This protruding bolt was seized in and removed with pliers.
Removing the base of the machine reveals the electrics. This is a simple set up with direct connections through a double pole switch direct to the motor. Earthing connects to the body of the machine.
Looking down in to the body of the machine from below reveals the motor and head bolts which are around 4 inches long. These clamp the head of the machine to the base and are difficult to remove. Using a long Allen key and extension bar removing these is a slow laborious task.
The motor finally removed with the bottom burr still attached by a 17mm bolt. Locking the motor allows easily removal of the burr. The motor is generally well sealed from stray grinds, but is blown out with high compressed air.
Removing the front badge reveals the true manufacture below. A literal rebrand!
The body of the machine fully removed ready to be prepared for painting.
The bottom burr removed.
All of the components exposed to coffee are soaked in Cafiza 2. This product effectively strips away all coffee oils and stains and brings the surfaces up spotlessly clean.
The magic of Cafiza 2. Appears brand new
