MiniBuild: Coffee Scoop

Morning-Coffee-Wise, I’m perfectly content with the instant stuff. My wife, however, needs to brew a cup with her fancy stainless steel mesh pour-over cone.

According to the instructions on the side of almost every bag of ground coffee she keeps in the fridge, the ideal amount of grounds for pour over coffee brewing is 2 tablespoons or 30 ml of grounds for every 6 ounces of water. She has a set of stainless steel measuring scoops (none of which are big enough, I think, to count as measuring cups, even though the largest does technically measure a cup) and the 1/8th cup scoop – which is close enough to 30 ml as to be basically equivalent – has gone missing. The working theory is that it got accidentally thrown out with the last bag empty bag of coffee grounds, but who can say?

Since PLA is largely food-safe, especially in cases where no heat of moisture is involved, I offered to print out a replacement scoop or three for her. I looked on Thangs to see if there was one readily available, but none of them were the same form factor as the other scoops in the set and that was important to her. Calipers in hand, I took a few measurements, the busted out my high school geometry to figure out the internal dimensions of the scoop to make sure it totaled 30 ml.

Not two tablespoons. Not 1/8th of a Cup. Thirty milliliters. As science intended.

With all the needed numbers, I started drafting it up in TinkerCad. Eventually, I’ll learn OnShape, or maybe get that cheap yearly subscription to SolidWorks for Makers, but for now TinkerCad suits all my needs. I actually made use of their newest tool: sketch. Being able to spline the perfect curve for the handle was great.

3D printed scoop vs metal scoop

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