[title inspired by one of my forum forebears, Mark Hoy. Thanks for the manuals... and the excellently documented restoration!]



This beautiful machine hails from San Francisco, and doesn't appear to have been used much at all. Great, right? Unfortunately, the machine doesn't seem to have been used much at all. Or cleaned. Ever.

The portafilters were completely gross. I've never seen scale on top of gobs of rancid coffee. I don't understand how anyone can be so stupid as to make coffee using equipment this dirty. I mean, you wouldn't bake a cake in a casserole dish without cleaning out the casserole remnants first, would you? Disgusting.



As you can imagine, the group was a piece of work. I just about destroyed the shower screen screw getting it dissassembled. It was stuck bad.



Still, nothing revolutionary. It's gotten pretty clean with a little bit of work.

The one bit of unexpected horror (considering this machine was sold as "working fine") was that the pump was completely seized! Pulled it off the motor, and the motor is intact... spins perfectly. The pump's spindle was stuck like a rock, and it took me some serious torquing with a wrench to un-seize it. It still spun really roughly, so it's getting retired to use as a bookend...



The seller has agreed to cover the cost of the new pump in the form of a partial refund, so all is well, other than having to wait a week to try the machine out.

I completed a full descale of the boiler and all tubing last night... I will post more pics, issues, etc. as the story unfolds.

I'm looking forward to some tasty 'spro.

I unseized the pump last night with a wrench just like you did, but it sounds awful when you run it. The motion when turning by hand is not at all smooth. It also leaks out the bypass valve after unseizing it (I pulled it to see if I could see anything wrong with it). Maybe I put it back on wrong? I just assumed the screeching was from shot bearings, but I don't know...

Anyway, I will try to descale it this weekend when I get home and see if I can fix my assembly error so it stops leaking and screeching.

Thanks Todd. Overall it's in excellent shape. The levers for the steam/water tap were bent in shipping, as was the front part of the frame (ever so slightly). Other than a few scratches (strikingly few for a nearly 10-year-old machine), those are the only cosmetic issues with it, and I am going to get them fixed on UPS' dollar it looks like (seeing that they did the damage).


just what I was afraid of...

Any suggestions other than buying a pair of these, particularly if you know it will be impossible to separate the bent levers from the spheres without causing damage. I've already gotten the wood handles off of the lever part, so that's a non-issue.

Internally, the T1 was your average trainwreck, as I mentioned, with the exception that there was absolutely no evidence of leakage, ever. The frame is pristine, other than a little rust around the bared areas where the legs thread in. I will probably brush some rustoleum on these areas as a stopgap. I'd love some advice in that vein--i.e., how to patch the few scratches on an otherwise excellent frame.

The boiler had surprisingly minimal scale, but the grouphead was rough:



It took me some time to fully realize that the gicleur screen and cap were removable. I knew they were, but they sure wouldn't budge. It's amazing to me that this machine was backflushing (on line pressure) or even delivering water at all before I dismantled it.


I didn't have any cork, so I wadded up paper towels and stuffed them in the HX inlets and the solenoid pilot hole. This worked really well, because the towels got soaked with citric acid and descaled the blocked off parts. It leaked slowly, but that just allowed me to refill it with more acid regularly.

Meanwhile, the boiler and pipes got some love in a white bucket formerly tasked with holding dirty diapers (was bleached judiciously before use on the boiler descale):



After a lot of scrubbing around the heating element area, it's ready to go:


all holes capped; I am going to size the insulation directly onto the boiler before hooking it up... too easy to pass up the opportunity.

So, with all that work done, I am waiting on new parts--pump, insulation, steam/water tap levers, and I am out of town for Christmas. The Elektra is waiting patiently to be completed, but looking beautiful while she waits:



I have a question, looking at that picture. How in the world does the lid go on, fellow Elektra owners? I see there are 2 parts, one with 2 rows of vents, the other with 3, and they are out of phase so that there's no direct drain of water down to the internals. It seems like one of the lid pieces is larger than the other one, so that the small one fits inside it, presumably it's intended to go "upside down" inside the big lid piece.

... and then you drop it into the top of the machine? This seems obvious, but it's such a pain to get back out, I feel like I must be doing something wrong.

This afternoon I needed coffee and I didn't feel like setting Vetrano back up. so...


Juxtaposition. The La Pavoni was so upset at me over the Robur, that it refused to get dialed in right. Tough times, these...

Mark, thanks for the welcome. It was indeed that machine. I paid a little more for it than I would have for a machine in the cosmetic condition yours was in. I remember how much time you spend polishing away, and I'd pay a couple hundred bucks to avoid that...

mhoy wrote:For the life of me, I could not get the handles off the steam/water valves. I think if I was willing to destroy them I could have done it.

Really? I remember you saying that. I couldn't grip it right with my bare hands, but I had no trouble removing them when I locked the lever part with a 12 mm wrench and gripped the handle with a damp rag. It gave me all the traction I needed to thread it right off. This worked with the portafilter handles, too.

I am hoping that, when I disassemble the main steam/water tap valve assembly, separating the sphere from the lever will be as easy as taking off the handle.

stefano65 wrote:Nicholas are you sure the lever is bent and not only the normally swivel position on the ball stuck because of the counter nut is too tight?
before I'll send your parts order out ( thank you by the way) try to loosen the counter nut and see
the lever front shaft it's so short in the new style that it's hard for me to imagine that it got bent
let me know

I'll make sure and have a look on Sunday when I get home and let you know. Here's what I can tell you from my close examination:

1. The valves feel perfect. They operate as new when the machine is on and up to pressure... tight, but easy and smooth, and securely in place (no bouncing/jiggling around, like the display model T1 at Williams Sonoma near my house). I'm almost afraid to take them apart, they feel so nice.

2. There's a nick in the tightening nut that the ball valve sits in where the lever was slammed against it and bent against it.

I am pretty sure, judging by how the machine came shipped, the condition of the box, and the position of the levers when it arrived (stuck inwards towards the grouphead and the driptray) that the machine was rested on its side in the box and the weight of the machine pressed down on the levers against the tightening nut.

I will try to get a better picture of it when I get home, but for now that's what I know. Are those symptoms consistent with overtightening, or can I rule it out?

By the way, thanks to Stefano for helping me troubleshoot my machine, his day job, not only on vacation, but on Christmas morning... Thank you Stefano. I hope you enjoy the rest of the day and your holiday.

Congrats on your new ADDITIONAL machine, Nicholas.

There is an excellent Elektra hydraulics diagram on my crude FTP site courtesy of an avid CG poster, Brad Seaman. Brad passed away in May of this year and was quite knowledgable regards the Elektra, including the design of a beautiful grouphead thermocouple arrangement.

http://users.rcn.com/erics/Elektra_Hydraulic_R01.pdf

Jason, thanks! About the 90° angle, that seems like it would let water drip right onto the boiler/other internals... strange.

Eric, thanks for that PDF. Very useful. I have thought about the TC install that I saw, but it's a pretty tiny screw that you run it in on... I am leery of threading in such a tiny fitting to a grouphead.

Andy: sometimes, you just scare me. I wonder if dow corning or something else that's food safe would do the trick.

The photo below is Brad Seaman's work and the fitting is readily available from Beswick Engineering:

Needless to say, Brad and I had many pleasant email exchanges.

Yeah, that's the one that I saw. He has a lot of cool ideas documented on his Flickr site,--the TC fitting above, a nice insulation job, and some work on making a doserless mod for a Mazzer grinder.

[edit] By readily available, I assume you meant this? That's tempting. My hobbyist machinist friend was pretty leery of building such a fitting from scratch. He's been cautious ever since one of my friends broke one of his M6 E61 thermocouple adaptors in half inside his Vibiemme grouphead (overtightened it). [/edit]

The only thing I didn't care for with that mounting was the way that it blocks access to the group bell without removing the fitting, which seems like an inconvenience. I've seen another pic of a TC mounting where the 30 gauge wire was simply put across the viton o-ring on the group bell, and snaked through one of the holes in said bell.

I was kind of hoping that the flushing would be straightforward enough that I wouldn't need a probe readout. I'm hoping to get my hands on a borrowed Scace device at some point to help tune my flush routine nicely. I'm really looking forward to a group that recovers quickly; Vetrano doesn't take well to my excessive cleaning flushes when I entertain company.

Eric,

Checking out the Beswick fittings makes me think about one thing. I am planning on PIDing the Elektra before long. Not that I care about the accuracy or the deadband; I just want something more reliable than a 9 year old Sirai stat whose contacts are looking rather tired, and a PID job is not much more expensive than the pressurestat, and would make me feel more comfortable about leaving the machine unattended.

I appreciated your post on discounted PXR3's, and I picked one up for this job, along with an Omron SSR. I have yet to decide on the thermocouple or placement. My first thought is to get a compression fitting made to go on the 1/4 BSP hookup on the boiler where the pressurestat hooks up now. still, if I could find a 1/4" BSP cap that could be tapped to take an compression fitting like Beswick makes, that would be better. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, especially if you can just tell me some parts to order...

Mark,

What PID controller do you use? I use a cheap 1/32 DIN PID from Auber with a very long 1/16" probe from Omega. You can see it on my machine here (pardon the iced cappuccino... summer and all, you know ). Anyway, it reads at 4Hz. It seems quite fast to me.