William Bounds Stainless-Steel Tapered Pepper Mill

 (20 customer reviews)

Cooking is a way of life in our household. We grow all sorts of
herbs and spices, many that one cannot normally find in the
typical USA supermarket. Spices are important to us, so
needless to say, freshly ground black pepper is considered to
be a necessity.We have gone through so many pepper mills over the years! It's
been a very disheartening experience. Earlier this year my wife
and I were actually discussing how great it would be if we could
find a good pepper mill. If only someone had a recommendation.Our wish came true.In the weekly "Food & Wine" section of our local newspaper
(San Jose Mercury News, January 30, 2002) there was an article
that listed readers comments to an article where a dozen local
chefs recommended the "Top 10" kitchen tools. A reader (Susan
Barnett, Sunnyvale, CA) wrote that after many years of
disappointment and frustration (like me) she finally discovered
mills made by William...Read more

I purchased two of these mills in early 2003 -- one for myself and one for my Mom -- based on a glowing 2002 Amazon user review which was at that time the only information I could find on this neat-looking product. Both mills broke down completely after about four months of light to moderate use. My Mom's mill and mine broke within a week of each other and in exactly the same manner. There appears to be something intrinsically wrong with the design of this mill that causes the components to stop grinding properly and then to come apart. And the lifetime guarantee is not particularly useful either. One must spend about $7-8 shipping the mill back to Wm Bounds and include a check for about $8 for them to ship it back. Your already suspect $37 pepper mill has now cost you around $52. We did this with one mill and Bounds sent a new one within a few weeks. Guess what? It fell apart after 4 months of extremely gentle use. We gave up. We now have $89 worth of non-functioning...Read more

I bought 2 of these mills over a year ago. One was for salt and this one has worked flawlessly. The other was for pepper and like other people have said, it seemed to have gotten stuck in coarse mode. Being the fix-it guy I am, I decided to figure out what the problem was so I took it apart. If you look at the bottom of the mill, you'll see the ceramic grinder bit and its surrounding base. The bit is attached to the shaft which goes all the way to the crank handle. The base is also attached to this shaft and is only held in place by a spring tensioner. But it seems the spring is not strong enough so that when you start to grind with pepper, the little pepper seeds are so hard that they start to push the base away from the grinder bit and they eventually get stuck between the base and the container. This effectively causes the grinder to get stuck in coarse mode.

The solution I came up with was to glue that darn base permanently to the bottom of the mill with super glue...Read more