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Comment by hosteur | Hacker News Reader

For pop corn you need fine grained salt. A grinder lets you control that. It is only about the grain sizes. Nothing about freshness with salt. With pepper it is about freshly releases aromatics.

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I’ve never found a salt grinder able to sustain the salt corrosion in the long run. Sooner or later, salt is aggregating and turning even the more resistant parts into rust.

I was recently planning to get back to a regular pestle/mortar setup after yet another costly failure. Did you manage to find a way to work this around?

I use ceramic grinder. No corrosion possible.

> I’ve never found a salt grinder able to sustain the salt corrosion in the long run

There are ceramic grinders now. I'd expect those to not rust, but I don't know how long they stay sharp.

You can make ceramics harder than the hardest steel so staying sharp shouldn’t be a problem.

I've had ceramic salt grinders for years now. Anecdotally you're right, never thought about replacing them.

What timescale are you talking about? I have a William Sonoma salt grinder, as well as one that my friend made for me. They're both about 5 years old. As far as I know there's no significant deterioration on either one. The grinding surfaces are ceramic.

Had usually some issues with (metallic) screws or other minor pieces after 1-2 years. Will take a look at ceramic grinders in the future.

I looked under my William Sonoma grinder today, and the metal screws and bracket near the ceramic grinder are in fine shape.

I've had a fully plastic one for about 5 years

Delivering microplastics right into the food since 19xx.

we use a cheap ikea grinder, it has ceramic burrs and has undergone countless refills and dishwasher cycles.

It’s easy enough in the US to just buy fine grained salt.

A coffee grinder will quickly make a lot of really fine salt. I do that when I need to heat treat 3D printed parts to improve their material strength. You pack the part into fine salt, bake it at the original extrusion temperature, then slowly let it cool down. The plastic liquefies, and the packed salt holds its shape.

That'll probably really fuck up a coffee grinder, so make sure you don't use it for coffee.

I would assume they are talking about a blade "coffee" grinder, which is ironically terrible for coffee.

If you want a really fine grind in a hurry you can use one and get ok results. You have to let it rest every 30s or so to cool down or it heats the grounds too much. I liked to shake it while grinding too. It isn't quite Turkish grind and there are a few large pieces that won't get full extraction, but if you want really fast extraction (or fast intentional over extraction) it works.

Yeah, a blade coffee grinder. For sure don't run salt through your expensive burr grinder!

why would it fuck up a coffee grinder?

Salt corrodes stuff

And salt is a lot harder than a coffee bean. Blade is probably a really weak/soft metal. Might be harder than salt on the Mohs scale, but that just buys you time.

Blade also gets kicked around more going around the salt instead of grinding through, more bending = shorter lifespan.

A good blender works too.

Nice method, what infill do you need for that to work? 100% or is less possible?

You do need 100%, otherwise you'll end up with a void at the top once the plastic melts. You could experiment with intentionally designing in a "sprue" of extra material to melt and control where the void is, but I haven't tried it yet.

I've successfully used this method on a sun gear for a planetary gear box designed for a low speed, high torque application. Due to mechanical constraints, the gear only had about 1.2mm of wall thickness at a 5mm radius, and it was prone to shearing off. Remelting it in salt solved the shearing, without having to redesign anything else.

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