gizmag Article: The AeroPress Coffee Machine: a new concept in an ancient art :
There’s always a better way – ALWAYS! Humans have been consuming coffee for 1200 years, the first coffee shops opened 500 years ago and coffee is the world’s second largest traded commodity, behind only oil. More than 1.5 billion cups of coffee are consumed every day with the US market for coffee machines at 20 million a year and growing. You’d think we would have already perfected the best way to produce a cup of coffee from coffee beans, but several years of research by Stanford University mechanical engineering lecturer Alan Adler (the inventor of the Aerobie flying disk which holds the world throwing record of more than a quarter mile) appear to have found a better coffee machine. Independent reviews suggest the new Aerobie AeroPress delivers the smoothest, richest, purest and fastest cup of coffee (under 30 seconds) you’re likely to find and the bonus is that the AeroPress costs just US$30. And while it might look like a French Press because both use immersion and pressure, it works quite differently.
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6 Comments
Looking at that site, it appears that all those cameras have a pinhole size of 0.2 (ZERO POINT TWO) to 0.4 millimeters. That’s 1/128 to 1/64 of an inch; not really drill bit territory.
gah. Note to self: don’t think when you’ve just had dental surgery (2 hours of drilling and implant-placing with bigger drillbits than any of the above cited). I somehow missed the decimal (I think got confused going back and forth between the increasingly eensy decimal inches and the metric equivalents).
So forget what I said and look at the pictures.
I’ve messed about quite a bit with pinhole stuff. I love it for fresh stuff.
I got my .001 shim stock from tacoma screw and then got some super fine grit sandpaper and then punctured the shim stock with a needle just a bit and then sanded the bump on the other side and poked it a little bigger from the other side followed by more sanding. I think I had to buy a whole roll of it for like $15 or something. Having a smooth hole helps.
If you are thinking about developing film, you might take the easier route of developing paper as a film. You only get one shot per camera per setup, but if you’ve got the chemicals set up, you get instant feedback (well a few minutes) and then shoot again. You can also make your own camera boxes and that’s fun and it’s a lot easier to scan in 8×10 pieces of photo paper. You can also get a lot better resolution because film is so tiny. I don’t think you get as much latitude as with film, but I really liked it.
If you’re going to do film though, find yourself an old 120 fold down camera and convert it. I think it’s easier to develop than 35mm. If you don’t want the chemicals. I remember you can develop yourself with the chemicals at the photo center northwest for just a few bucks a roll. (I seem to remember that it was $2 a roll.)
Hmm, I didn’t know about the shim stock angle. I hear it mentioned and but didn’t know much about it.
I’m kind of surprised the popcan didn’t work, but perhaps it was how the hole was made and finished.
I suppose I could take another whack at it.
On processing: I like 35 mm film for ease of handling. I don’t know anything about 120. I think this would be a good way to learn and I expect a cheap 120 camera can be had at a variety of places.
Thanks for the advice.
Huh. I could have sworn I left a comment in one of the other pinhole posts, but I don’t see it, so maybe not. In any case, I didn’t say anything that others haven’t said. You’re inspiring me to get my cameras out and play around now, though, so thanks!
If you need to figure out what size pinhole you have, one way is to scan it at high resolution on a flatbed scanner and count how many pixels wide the hole is. You’re welcome to come use my scanner for that, if you need to.
Oh, and about 35mm vs 120 for processing: I find it a pain in the ass to load 120 film onto a spool for processing, compared to 35mm.
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