VICTORIA Manual Grain Grinder Cast Iron Grain Grinder (High Hopper)

As an engineering student and inventor, this product angers me so very much. I've been wanting to chronicle my hatred of it for some time.People said to me Victoria was the gold standard for making masa harina, so I had a friend order me one on American Amazon where this product is much cheaper. I feel sorry for anyone who thinks this is a good product. If the creators of this product honestly think their product is good, I also feel sorry for them.The design is inherently flawed in several, easily redesigned ways.1. It does not feed correctly.First, the hopper throat tapers steeply, meaning food gets caught on the sides of it and forms a sort of arch that you need to constantly manually break. Making the sides straight instead of sloping would fix this. Second, the corkscrew does not fully fit the body of the machine. There's at least a 6mm gap all the way around between the screw and the barrel. Perhaps this functions as a pressure release, but if so it still doesn't need to be this way under the throat, so it should be made bigger there. A corkscrew with a moving center like in a meat grinder, rather than the simple spiral staircase design here, would also help improve the feed and be trivial to design and incorporate.2. It leaks.It drips out the handle because the fit is poor and there's no seal. It leaks out the top of the grinding wheels because the plastic thingy meant to keep this from happening doesn't work. It simply fills, jams, and gets pushed out. Whatever you're making is extruded and sprinkled everywhere. It drips food from the throat because you've removed the hopper because you need to manually feed the thing because otherwise it'll clog. For every handful of food you drop into the tiny throat, a little bit falls on the floor.3. It doesn't produce flour.It grinds corn to the consistency of couscous. Run through again, 50 laborious grams at a time because remember, it jams, and it grinds it to the consistency of beach sand. Corn tortillas, the ostensible purpose of this device, end up crumbly and thick.4. It's an ergonomic disaster.The handle is ever so slightly too long and doesn't really move in sync with my arm joints. I realize people are different sizes but I've never had this problem with another grinder. The table clamp is shallow and none of the inside surfaces are squared off, so cranking the handle slowly rocks the device off of your table. It can't be cast square because of the limitations of sand casting, but it certainly can be filed or milled square after the fact. The very short distance between the grinding faces and the stand also means you can't fit a bowl under it easily to catch what it outputs. The wooden handle end squeaks in a high pitched, child-and-dog-torturing way because, surprise surprise, it's not a perfect fit. It's not removable and the design prevents oiling.5. The coating gets ground into the food.Others have written extensively on this, so I'll let them speak for me, sufficing to say, my meat grinder simply uses unfinished cast iron on all surfaces that touch food. Surely they could simply avoid plating all food contacting surfaces on this device as well.Frankly, using this thing is an enormous chore and I've been searching for better ways to grind corn since the first day I owned it.Manufacturers make mistakes. Normal manufacturers rectify those mistakes over the lifespan of the product. Victoria made mistakes in 1950. Almost all of them are easily solved, but nah, who cares, keep making the same flawed design in exactly the same way for 70 years straight and be proud of the fact.It isn't even an issue of manufacturing equipment modification being expensive. This product is sand-cast rather than diecast, repairing most of the design flaws would be as simple as hiring someone to carve a new wooden mold blank.I'm not angry that this tool is bad. I'm angry that it's been bad for 70 years. I'm angry that nobody at Victoria ever thought to innovate and improve. I'm angry that this barely working device has existed and unnecessarily wasted people's time and effort for so long that it's become an institution of it's own.