We have an old pepper mill that's been doing a pretty poor job of grinding pepper corns lately. The mill has been replaced with a new one so we can grind pepper corns reliably again. I thought I'd take a look-see at what the old mill's mechanism consists of. Here's a view of the complete old pepper mill.
The lid comes off, of course, for filling the mill with pepper corns.
That ball-nut is 10-32.
At the underside of the mill, there's what appears to be a black plastic retainer of some sort.
There's no brand name on the mechanism, just "STAINLESS STEET". Hmmm. I wonder how many times that misspelling was repeated in metal.
A bit of judicious prying gets the retainer to come out, along with the mechanism.
There's a collar affair up inside the cavity that serves as an upper-end stop for the mechanism's biasing spring.
And here we have the business end of the mill revealed.
That spring biases the rotor downward when the mill is assembled. Apart from the spring, the unit can't be further disassembled non-destructively. I can see no practicable way to restore the mill's effectiveness.
So there we are with some salvage -- a 10-32 ball-nut, a five-inch length of 3/16" square rod and a small compression spring.
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