After some discussion, we have decided to buy a dough rounder to help with the laborious task of rolling dough balls after the end of a busy night but the equipment stores in the area I live in barely know what a rounder is let alone have have used rounders in stock. Our budget for a rounder isn’t enough to get a new one, but I’m hesitant to buy one online without seeing it in person first, especially since it isn’t a cheap piece of equipment. So far, eBay looks like the only place I can find a good deal on one. Does anyone have any experience with this or advice on where to look?
I’m not really experienced in buying through Ebay, but; 1) Ebay has vendor ratings that can give you confidence that you’re dealing with a reputable seller, and 2) if you pay with PayPal they will provide you with protection from scams or merchandise that wasn’t as promised … https://www.paypal.com/us/smarthelp/article/does-paypal-cover-my-purchase-if-there’s-a-problem-faq645
How much volume are you doing? If it is not several hundred doughballs per night I can see there being any savings with a rounder. If you still have to cut and weigh the difference will be minimal.
Good point about the ebay guarantee thing… I don’t usually purchase expensive items on ebay I’ll have to see what the limits of the guarantee are
As far as volume goes, we are rolling maybe 100 on a slow night to 2 times that on a busy night, which isn’t really the end of the world with a couple people rolling but I am usually doing dough when we are already tired after the shift so I’m trying to find a way to make it a little easier for us. I know there is a bit of cleanup involved with a rounder but the dishwasher can just take care of that so it doesn’t add to my workload that much.
I have one in storage. I bought it at Pizza Expo 2 years ago, It works good, but doesn’t really save a lot of time. My employees prefer to roll by hand. It can be cleaned in minutes, the dough just doesn’t stick to it.
I think it would work better if you used it with the lid off and bypassed the safety mechanism. I’m in Houston and would take much less for it. It’s barely used.
Paul
I watch ebay for deals on dough rounders and in my opinion they are rare. Many of the ones I see are 10+ years old selling for 60% of what a new one costs. If the previous owner used an abrasive material to clean the screw, you’ll quickly find yourself shelling out $2000 for a new one. I’d only consider buying a new or nearly new one off ebay(which I have, twice). Most used AM rounders are currently listed between $4500-$5500 plus shipping. Given those options, I think an $8000 new AM rounder should be considered and I’d definitely consider a $5600 Sommerset SDR 400.
Thanks for the insight into the eBay thing. I didn’t think about the cost of replacing the screw, the majority on eBay are around $5k and look like they have been used a lot. I’d really like to get an AM over the Somerset just based on all of what I’ve read on this forum, even though I hear they are both good, I think I am going to keep my eye out for a nearly new one on eBay and see if I can get a deal. I’m not in a huge hurry to get one, but I would like to get one in the very near future to give my hands a bit of a break
You are not doing enough volume for the rounder to save you any time or money. I don’t know what your batch size is but for us 100 doughballs, assuming a mix of sizes, would have been about three batches. One reasonably fast worker could do that in an hour. By the time you add setting up and tearing down using the machine will not save any time.
What we eventually did was take the dough job out of the regular prep cycle and made it separate job for which we paid piece rate per batch. We put a chart on the bulletin board and the “dough guy” would come in with his own key and make the required number of batches. Over the years some of them chose to do it late at night, others came in early in the morning. With the piece rate the ones that were fast made really good money. Slower guys ended up about where we were anyway paying the cooks to do it on shift.
Some years a couple of cooks would take on that extra opportunity for some $$. Other years we had someone who just did it as a side job. We had one guy that did it for about three years coming in at 4AM after his other job.
We also sometimes had a dough guy do the job on the 4 biggest days of the week and regular cooks do in the afternoon slow time the other days.
we have a divider and rounder from somerset. have had the rounder for 4 or 5 months year and just got the diver up and running a month ago. also got a LBC spiral mixer 6 months ago when out hobart had a catastrophic injury. the lbc lets us make batches 2-3 x what we made in our hobart and the divider rounder can process it in short order and cleanup is less than 30 min. the 3 pieces of equipment have cut a 6-7 hour dough shift into a 2-3 hour shift. easily a 2 year return on investment. zero regrets with any of the pieces of equipment.
I have one that I purchased maybe 7-8 years ago. We used it for about a month or two and then my dough guy said he preferred to roll it by hand. Needless to say this machine sits in my dry storage room not being used. Pretty much forgot about it which is ridiculous since I probably paid between $8-10k for it. Anyway, I’d have to look up model number and what I paid for it and we can negotiate a price if you’re interested. Be happy to send you pictures if requested.
where are you located?..although my AM Mfg Round-O-Matic is still going strong after approx 15yrs I always like to have backup…the way I look at it if you are doing at least 3 batches of dough on your slowest days (60qt mixer) than a Rounder is worthwhile.
I know this is a very old post
and long shot, but im looking to pick up a used divider rounder. Let me know if this is still available
Im looking to pick up a divider rounder if its still available?
I know this is an older thread, but why do you do the dough at night when everyone is tired? Do it at the beginning of the shift. Like mentioned earlier, a good person can go 3 25# batches in an hour. I have done 5 in an hour before. It depends on the size of the dough balls you are making. We make 6, 9, 14, 19 and 54 oz dough balls. Its a lot easier to do a batch of 14 or 19oz balls than the 6 or 9. Putting 8 on a tray is much quicker than 15!
We make anywhere from 2-6 batches per day. Look at bringing someone in an hour or 2 earlier for their shift to do it then, find other ways to work it in. The payoff on a machine like this would probably be a very long time, especially if your dough roller (person) is fast.
But if your cutter is as fast as this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTTsOcX4b38
it might be worth it!
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Our rule for rounding/balling the dough is that it must be completely done within 20-minutes of removing the dough from the mixer. Two people, one cutting/scaling and one rounding can process 85# of dough in 17 to 20-minutes. We did this all the time when we used to do the AIB Annual Pizza Seminar. Using a dough rounder won’t be any faster but it will make the job a bit easier. The AM Rounder only has four parts, nothing to set-up, just toss the scaled dough pieces into the machine and they come out round. Cleaning is a snap and only takes a couple of minutes.
Tom Lehmann/The Dough Doctor
Good morning to all forum .
I’m the owner of Ballmatic, an Italian producer company of dough rounder . We are producers and we sell our rounders with most competitive price in the world.
If someone can be interest you can find our rounders on eBay searching “Ballmatic” or Starpizza dough rounder .
Or you can go at www.ballmatic.it , where , if you go at page “Ballmatic in the world” , you can contact another buyer near you who bought our machine. It is one of best machine for pizza and it is all made in Italy.
You can see videos also on YouTube
Thanks
We purchased a Somerset dough rounder with the table but I cannot find a dough box to fit the table. Ours are about 3.25" high and it seems the table only allows for about 2.5". I can’t seem to find anything in that size. Any suggestions/links?
Thanks
If your model is similar to ours, you can cut a couple notches in a dough box and then use it to catch the balls like this:
Hooks under the lip of the machine and stays put on the machine’s table.
Same exact model, thanks. I’ve got quite a few boxes laying around that we aren’t using so we will give it a try!
How often do you clean your rounder? I know you should all the time, but someone already screwed up our lid and lost the spacers so we had to buy a new lid, white disc and auger 