My bullet arrived Friday and today (Sunday night) I have the time to start seasoning my drum. I measured out 450g of old beans and loaded it after preheating. Within a minute green beans started falling into the cooling tray. I noticed beans were getting lodged under the drum and prying the door open just enough for beans to start dropping out of the roaster. I quickly got the beans out and put them back in and held the door down with a spatula to get through the roast.
Tried doing a second seasoning batch and the same thing started happening almost immediately after charging the roaster with beans. I’m afraid beans are going to get below the drum and cause issues.
Has anyone experienced this? Also the pin for the tryer fell out during the first seasoning roast.
I’m going to put the roaster away for tonight and take off the front panel later to see if I can get those beans out or verify there are none below the drum.
Below is a picture of the tryer with the missing pin and the spot where the beans are getting lodged and propping the door open slightly. Any help, insight or suggestions would be appreciated.
Update: I spoke to a good friend of mine who has been a bullet user for a couple of years now. He mentioned that issue with the beans does happen sometimes and they do eventually come out.
If the beans dropping out persists it could be related to the number of shims installed on the front of the drum shaft. You may have to remove one of them to position the drum a tiny bit further forward which will reduce the space between the front of the drum and the face plate. But before you remove any shims…
Confirm that nothing has happened to the front bearing mounted in the face plate… it might have been dislodged or pushed back a tiny bit. That shouldn’t happen but who knows what occurred during shipment?!
If the front bearing is ok (it probably is), the approach would be to remove the thinnest shim first; if that fails to do the trick, replace that thin one and remove a thicker shim. In addition to the shims installed on the front of the drum shaft you should also have a couple spares in the tool kit storage pocket- they may come in handy if the drum should scrape the face plate (not the issue you’re facing right now). The shims look like washers but they have much tighter tolerances on flatness, thickness and diameters.
If you get the spacing wrong by removing too much of the set-back spacing, the Bullet will let you know: you’ll hear a scraping sound as the drum brushes the front plate.
Thank you sir for the great information! Hopefully tomorrow I can get two more seasoning roasts done so I can start roasting for consumption.
The beans I seasoned with was two pounds of old Colombian beans. The next two pounds will be with newer Brazilian beans. So that will be a good test to see if it’s just due to smaller beans. Who knows.
Status update. I did two more 1lbs seasoning batches with different beans. This made a total of four 1lbs seasoning roasts. This time they were Brazilian beans, the other beans were Colombian. I had no issues with any of the bean popping out of the roaster.
I then did a roasting batch with those beans for consumption and then a Kenyan Peaberry bean, both roasted just fine without any beans popping out. @bab I’ll definitely keep your suggestions in mind if I continue to have issues I experienced during my first two seasoning roasts.
@billc Thank you too for your feedback too, I appreciate it!
From the Bullet manual under: Seasoning the Drum:
â—Ź Drum speed should be set to D9 for the first 10 roasts. This is to prevent beans getting stuck and potentially pushing the door open. After about 10 roasts, the surface should have less friction and the drum speed can be lowered.
Thanks @billc for that. I’ve read the manual multiple times and recall keeping the drum at full speed for the first ten roasts. I missed it saying it would help prevent the beans from popping out. Like I was telling my friend @ruint who came over and helped out last night. If it was for the first two seasoning roasts right out of the box I don’t think I would have thought much about it.
I’m looking forward to becoming part of this community as I continue learning and roasting more coffee!
