Herb Grinder Tooth Design?

[Bnelly]

Happy Monday! Welcome to my thoughts haha pull up a chair, share thoughts, etc. These next bunch of words are gonna sound incredibly stoner-like. Please bare with me

So after smoking my after school bowl I remembered a post and thoughts from a few days ago, I freefalled, or would it be freefell, sorry lol, down the rabbit hole trying to find anything on the science behind the shapes of the teeth on grinders and the uses/benefits of them.

I saw a post from the founder of Raw Papers on instagram, where he mentioned redesigning the teeth in their version 2 grinder. Which got me thinking, "If there was no benefit to the design change they wouldn't have changed the teeth. It would've cost more money than just reusing the same design or updating the design maybe."

As much money as companies try to pump into production and efficiency to fully take advantage of the economy of scale, I can't imagine that they would just randomly pick a shape of arguably one of the most important aspects of their product. I know, through a s**t ton of science and physics type documentaries that are so riveting when you're baked and a few college courses, that different shapes and angles generate different properties and characteristics. For instance, a square tilted at 45°, moving through a fluid at speed, has a completely different coefficient of drag and produces way less turbulence than a square tilted at 0°. So the same would hold true no matter the scale, from planetary size to the extremely minuscule. Changing the angle and shape of the initial contact face wildly changes all of the other properties as well.

Turns out there isn't really anything I could find on the interwebs lol granted we are talking about incredibly unimportant scientific work here , so I wasn't really expecting anything either.

I'm hoping there's some crazy, awesome engineers in here that might have some insight into the matter. I'm kind of at a wall here so figure I'll ask for some assistance.

Thanks for the read and have a fantastic week! Cheers

 

[TorturedSoul]

Best change I could think of would be for all the manufacturers of aluminum- and plastic-tooth grinders to stop making them! After all, when those things get worn down - even a little bit - over time, that adds up to a relatively large amount of the stuff entering our bodies.

Both elemental titanium and titanium dioxide is supposed to be safe; we're told that the human body can tolerate a large dose of the stuff. In testing with lab animals, though, when those animals are exposed to titanium dioxide via inhalation, they developed small-localized areas of dark-colored dust deposits in the lungs.

Ceramic? There's a thought. I had a knife with a ceramic blade. While I didn't have it for a huge amount of time (dropped it while fishing and it went into the river), it was quite sharp, and remained so the entire time. Which is not really surprising... Bone has a hardness of about 3.5, steel knives about 6.5 and ceramic knives about 9.5. Diamonds are 10. So I wouldn't expect it to wear quickly if used for grinder teeth.

 

[Bob Loblaw]

I have a small what looks like a homemade grinder with small stiff wires in pattern, I prefer it over my factory made barrel grinder with the diamond shaped teeth. Indeed I never use the factory model.

I've a lathe but I'm not sure what kind or where to get a nice small stiff wire, If anyone has ideas for which wire to look for I would much appreciate it.

Ceramic sounds interesting, 9.5.... wow no wonder that ceramic knife sharpener works so well so fast. I would think that the downside to ceramic is the fact that it is very brittle. (at least I think it is brittle and prone to chipping)

 

[Bnelly]

Best change I could think of would be for all the manufacturers of aluminum- and plastic-tooth grinders to stop making them! After all, when those things get worn down - even a little bit - over time, that adds up to a relatively large amount of the stuff entering our bodies.

Both elemental titanium and titanium dioxide is supposed to be safe; we're told that the human body can tolerate a large dose of the stuff. In testing with lab animals, though, when those animals are exposed to titanium dioxide via inhalation, they developed small-localized areas of dark-colored dust deposits in the lungs.

Ceramic? There's a thought. I had a knife with a ceramic blade. While I didn't have it for a huge amount of time (dropped it while fishing and it went into the river), it was quite sharp, and remained so the entire time. Which is not really surprising... Bone has a hardness of about 3.5, steel knives about 6.5 and ceramic knives about 9.5. Diamonds are 10. So I wouldn't expect it to wear quickly if used for grinder teeth.

Very true, ceramic would be nice and last a long time but unless you put other additives in the mix it'd be very brittle, correct? IIRC the more hard an object the less impact resistant. So if you dropped it, the teeth could break off. I dont know much about ceramic so idk its ability to withstand impact.

Yeah metal dusts are super bad for you. I remember when I was in the military we got in some arguments with higher ups because they wanted us to manufacture molybdenum bearings in our heat treating oven that was in the main shop, with no extra forms of ventilation in there either. Talk about beggin for cancer lol

 

[TorturedSoul]

Yeah, don't attack ceramic items with a hammer, lol. Don't go pounding on a diamond with one, either.

I just recalled that, once upon a time, a friend of mine had a wooden grinder. I scoffed at it at the time, because, hey, wood is softer than the usual metal used in such things, right? But now, thinking about it... Probably the safer material for things that we use on a daily basis (when we have bud) to grind a substance that we consume.