Given your budget, a hand grinder sounds like a good call, or a good deal on eBay… I’m not that familiar with the Faema so I won’t comment there.
As for the Kyocera, the nice thing is you can fully disassemble the grinder by spinning off the nut on the bottom and clean the ceramic burrs easily… sometimes I soak them in oxyclean to get all the coffee stains off. Once you put things back together, I’m not sure any marks would still line up, but the adjustment nut on the bottom has bumps on one side that touch raised lines on the plastic inner sleeve that fits inside the lower burr so you can count and feel the clicks when tighten the burrs fully and then back off a certain number of clicks. I usually back off three to five clicks for espresso, but because of the bumps and lines, I’m not sure you could really call this a step-less grinder or if the adjustment would wander any if you lined up the nut so that the bump was on top of the line. It’s also easy to use degrees of rotation as a standard, like backing off 1/4, 1/2, or 3/4 turns… I go between 1/4 and 1/2 and lately have been grinding coarser and tamping lighter to get a better flow rate in my lever. The adjustment is not that fine… 1/4 turn is good for most espresso and one full turn is probably what I was using for AeroPress, so the thread pitch of the threaded rod is not that fine.
The Kyocera has a spring that presses down on the inner burr to maintain spacing if you set the grinder coarser for coffee… it works well for AeroPress, but I’ve heard mixed reports on using it for French Press… but getting a good hand grinder for French Press can be a challenge anyway. That and the Kyocera holds about 18 grams max so you may have to refill the grinder if your grinding for French Press.
The Kyocera grinder has been well discussed on CoffeeGeek, including this thread if you want to do more research.
I have noticed that Doug at Orphan Espresso seems to have a good number of hand grinders available now, more so then in the recent past… he rebuilds them and describes their grinding speed and quality so if you purchase from him you’ll be getting a known quality grinder.
If I were buying a grinder for espresso only and not planning on using it for traveling, I would probably go with a nice vintage box grinder instead of the Kyocera.
Kyocera, German mill, or Faema – Buying Advice • Home-Barista.com
Tags: adjustment nut, budget, coffee stains, ebay, thread pitch, top of the line