Mendo Mulcher Grinders

In this video I’m going to give you my updated review of Mendo Mulcher Grinders. This here is their medium four-piece model.

The Mendo is a quality grinder that has a lot of good things going for it. It’s just not the grinder that I personally use every day, and I’ll show you why.

In my opinion, one of the cool things about a Mendo is how rugged or heavy-duty it is. You can tell when you’re holding one of these that it’s heavier than almost every other grinder I’ve ever tried. It even has an extra grip and stuff around the top here. To me, it was designed to be able to grind through anything, which is cool if you find yourself having to grind up large quantities of herbs at once or herbs that happen to be tougher than usual.

Let me open it up now and show you what’s going on inside. The big difference on the inside here that sets the Mendo apart from most other grinders is that the second piece actually screws into the inside of the third piece. The threads are on the inside here and on the outside here, and it goes on the inside.

At first this seemed really cool to me, and I liked that it was different than other grinders, but after using it for a little while there were two things about this design that came up that bothered me a little bit. The first thing is that this rim here, or this edge of this second piece, is where build-up is going to start to occur once you start using your grinder a lot. This is the piece, though, that you have to grip and turn with your hand to tighten it and loosen it. You basically need to put your fingers right on whatever buildup is here.

The other part about it that bummed me out a little bit, and maybe this is because I’m a lefty, but what happened to me a few times when I was using this grinder is that I’d be grinding up my stuff as usual, but since there’s no way to really get a grip on the second piece with this finger, sometimes when I’d be grinding this second piece here would start to unscrew by itself from the friction from the top piece going back and forth. I know this doesn’t happen to a lot of people and I know that if you make sure you screw this real tight before you grind it’s not likely to happen, but it happened to me at least a few times and kind of irritated me a little bit.

Those are just a few points to keep in mind about this second piece. Otherwise, it is constructed really well. It’s got a good amount of nice sharp teeth. This grinder is made from a single piece of very high-quality aluminum so you’re not going to have to worry about teeth breaking off like you do with cheaper grinders.

The only other thing I would have liked to see on this grinder is maybe some type of trim around this piece here, or an O-ring or whatever, that some of the other premium grinders have to prevent metal-on-metal contact when you’re grinding. All that piece would do is increase the smoothness when you’re grinding and decrease any noise or squeaking that the grinder would make, which some people care about and others don’t.

Next, I’ll open up this piece and we’ll go to the third piece or the actual herb chamber where the screen is. This piece on the Mendo is nice and large, which is cool, because like I mentioned before, if you have a whole lot of herbs you want to grind up at once, not only will this thing grind it up real well but it gives you a nice big chamber to hold it in there.

Next I’m going to unscrew the last piece here so we can talk a little bit about the screen. The screen in the Mendo is a nice, high-quality screen. You can tell when you flip it over that the screen is actually set into the aluminum during the manufacturing process, which is a sign that this is a high-quality piece. It’s not glued on or anything like some of the cheaper knock-off grinders. That’s definitely a good thing. The only thing about the screen to keep in mind is that the pore size on this model is a little larger than some of the other grinders I’ve used, which isn’t terrible because that could help prevent clogs in the screen, but it lets a little more vegetation through with the pollen than some of the finer screens.

So as you can see, the Mendo Mulcher is a high-quality grinder and it’s definitely better than most grinders out there, especially the cheap ones, but there’s just a few things about the Mendo that I wasn’t really thrilled about that prevent it from being my first choice. If you think you want to get one, I put a link in the description to where you should go. Thanks for watching.

Old video transcription:

What up, my fellow herbivores? In this video I’m going to review the Mendo Mulcher Grinder, made in the USA, and I’m going to compare it to my favorite Space Case grinders. I know it’s hard to see, but it’s also made in the USA. It’s printed right there on the top. There are a few different things that I want to talk about regarding these because there are actually a bunch of differences.

First and foremost, I still think Space Case grinder is the best. Anybody watching this that doesn’t have a grinder yet and is wondering which one they should get, still get the Space Case. You may or may not have already seen my full Space Case review video, so you might want to check that one out to get a little more info. I’ll probably repeat a lot of it in this one also.

To start off, the size of the Mendo Mulcher that I bought was the smallest four-piece size that I found on their website, which I believe is two and a quarter inches. I don’t remember if they considered it medium or small, but it is bigger and heavier than the small Space Case, which is the one I have, which is not necessarily a good thing. I’ll explain why. This one was $50 on their website. I saw that it was $60 on eBay. The small Space Case four-piece you can get for $65.

I’ll just get right into the nitty-gritty about these. First of all, when you open both of them up, you’ll notice that the Mendo does have more teeth. You would think that this means that it’s a better grinder and that it’ll grind up your herbs finer, but I didn’t see any noticeable difference in the quality of the herbs after they were ground up or how finely ground up they were. So to me, how many teeth it has is pretty much irrelevant.

When these are all together, they feel very different when you’re grinding. When you pick up the Mendo, one of the first things that you’re going to notice is the way the top fits. I’m sure you can see this in the video. It doesn’t fit snugly. It’s a loose fit and I’m not sure if this is on purpose. I’m guessing it is, but I don’t see how this makes the grinder any better. To me, this just makes it feel a little cheesy. You could actually rock the top back and forth. All that’s holding it together is this little tiny magnet up here, but the rest of it just wobbles around. When you compare it to the Space Case, you can’t do that with the Space Case. The Space Case is sealed.

The other thing you’ll notice is that when you start to grind up stuff with this, listen to how loud it is. It’s not that great. It sounds a little cheesy. Now listen to the Space Case. That’s how a grinder is supposed to sound. I’ll even do it harder. You can’t even hear it. I’ll do that with this one. It’s crazy. It’s a little weird. It just makes the Mendo seem a little cheesier and makes the Space Case seem a little more luxurious.

While we’re talking about the top pieces, buildup inside the grinder is inevitable. No matter what kind of grinder you get, or how much money you spend on it, you’re always going to get some kind of buildup in the top pieces here. I’m grinding up my eucalyptus leaves in here so that’s the little residue that you see in mine, but it’s pretty much the same. You’ll also get a lot of buildup around the edge of the inside of the cap there. You’ll see it on the edges.

You’ll notice, as you saw before when I just gave you the demonstration for both of these, even with that much buildup on it, which is inevitable, the Space Case still works fantastically, almost like it was perfectly clean and new. Not as smooth, but pretty damn close. The Mendo, not so much. Once you get some buildup on here, you’ll notice the top catching a little bit. It’s just not as smooth.

The next part that’s different about these is actually how they’re constructed. This is piece one, the top piece, with both of them. It’s pretty similar except for the amount of teeth. With the Mendo, this next piece is the part that you would put your broken up herbs in. This piece actually screws inside the chamber, so the threads are on the inside of it. And then it’s got threads here and it screws in like that. This design is different than most grinders. It’s different than the Space Case but, again, I didn’t really see any real benefit to this. It doesn’t make it stick less. It still sticks a little bit when you screw and unscrew it. You’ll feel it catching every once in awhile from the buildup that gets stuck on the threads. That’s inevitable. That’s going to happen, you can’t avoid it. I guess they just did that to make it different, which is cool.

The inside of the chamber is different on both of these. It is bigger on the Mendo. Actually, hold on one second. Let me just go back to the top piece again. You’ll notice on the Space Case the threads are on the outside of the bottom piece and the inside of the cup. You’ll notice that the chamber inside of the Space Case is smaller but it’s perfectly flat in here. You might not be able to see it with the camera angle, but with the Mendo the screen is actually concave, it actually goes like that in the bottom. Again, this design was just done differently. I’m not really sure if it’s better or not. There aren’t really any obvious advantages to that, but I guess it’s cool because it’s different.

The next piece, when you unscrew the fourth piece which is the pollen catcher on both of these units, that piece is pretty much the same on both of these, but the quality of the pollen you’re going to get is different between these. I’ll explain why. The Mendo Mulcher, the size of the pores on the screen, I believe they say is 190 microns. That’s the space in between each one of the holes and that determines how much pollen or whatever is actually going to fall through into the catcher at the bottom when you grind it. 190 microns is a little on the large side.

Let’s see if you can see the difference. You might not be able to tell by the camera because it’s really a subtle difference and you almost need a microscope to see. The screen on the Space Case is a tiny bit finer. What that means is a difference in quality of the pollen at the end that you get. Again, you’re not going to be able to see with the camera but if you want to do this yourself at home, I’ll show you what I used. This thing is called a 420 scope and it’s even got a little light on it. It just lets you look at things up to100x magnification. You could also use something as simple as this 30x jeweler’s loupe. Both of these things help you see stuff up close and magnified.

If you use either of those and you look at the pollen that you’re getting at the end, remember from the eucalyptus leaves, you’ll notice that you actually will get a little more plant material in here in addition to the pollen. You can see with the naked eye little green speckles in here. It’s okay. The difference really is subtle; it’s not like night and day. It’s not a huge difference. I’ve definitely seen worse grinders that had bigger pores than this where they let a lot of stuff go through the screen, which is not really cool because you really don’t want anything other than the pollen coming through. You don’t want that much plant material in here. It kind of defeats the purpose. Again, if you’re looking at these through magnification, you’ll notice that the Space Case pollen is a little cleaner, meaning there’s less plant material in it and more of a golden color throughout, and less little green speckles sprinkled in. It’s not really a huge deal but it is a difference and that’s what I’m talking about here, the differences between these.

There’s actually one more thing I wanted to show you about these so I’m going to put them together really quick and fast-forward. The last thing I wanted to mention about these that I forgot to mention before, was that because of the way that the Mendo was designed, where the second piece screws inside the third piece, and you’ll see how that’s different with the Space Case because when you take off the top this whole thing is the second piece and you can see the crease right down the middle here. So technically, let’s say you had a lot of herbs in there and it was really tough to grind, with the Space Case you’re able to hold on to the second piece and grind the top up. Even if you’re running into trouble and it’s really hard to grind, it’s no big deal. Just a couple seconds and it’ll loosen up and everything will be fine because you have a grip on the second piece.

With the Mendo, you can’t grip the second piece while you’re grinding. You see how all you get is that little tiny lip here? You can’t grip that. There’s no other crease here. What happened to me a few times just in the last week was that I’ll be grinding up and then something will catch and it’ll be a little tough to grind for a second and then the whole grinder will start unscrewing. Do you see this? I’m just trying to grind and it just unscrewed. I don’t really think it’s supposed to do that because you don’t want it unscrewing while you’re grinding. You want to purposely unscrew it yourself. That, I think, is an actual minus to this unique design that they have with this second piece because you run into problems like that, which you don’t run into with the Space Case.

That’s going to wrap up the comparison of these two. If you own either one of these, let me know in the comments below what you think. I’m sure some people will disagree but I’m sure there are a lot of people that will agree, like all the Space Case owners out there. If you like what you see, please subscribe and you’ll get updated when I post new videos.

If you don’t own either one of these and you don’t own a Space Case and you’re looking to get a grinder, go to BestGrinder.info. That’s going to redirect you right to the Space Case page that’s going to have all the different sizes and colors that you could get from my favorite vaporizer store. I highly recommend it so check it out. It’s BestGrinder.info.

If you wanted to, you could also check out the link to my other full review of the Space Case. There’s a little more info there. That link will be in the description, and if you’re watching this on YouTube, right above the grinder here. So stay up and I will talk to you soon.