JHCCoffee Back to the thread and the FCD. I temporarily removed mine, just to see. Dumb idea?
If it helps, I can give the concept of why I came up with the flow control disk. Niche wanted to remove popcorning…I wanted to control flow. The flow control disk gave Niche what they wanted and me what I wanted. Win/Win.
By controlling flow into a conical burr set you get a more consistent grind and potentially less fines. Conical burrs work by the breaker zone really packing and “auguring” the coffee into the burrs. Something we probably don’t want if we need to get the best grind quality from the system. The disk prevents this happening so quickly.
If you look at power consumption with and without the disk you get something like this. I can’t quite draw the right shapes (and they don’t have a relative scale)…but you should get the idea.
In the first the grinder loads up and then gradually looses power…the grind going from fine to coarse as that happens. In the second shape, the grinder loads up and stays constant, then rapidly drops away. There is a much longer period of consistent grind size and the drop off is fast. In truth the power peak will be less in the second graph and the drawings are approximations to illustrate the point..