Thanks for the reply. I just called NJ Welds All LLC but they don't do brass and he told me to contact a radiator shop. Don't think he was too interested anyway since it was an appliance and I didn't know that welders stayed away from brass? Is this common?

I'm in Northern NJ about 2 hours from Philly.

Bluesman: thanks for the tutorial on wrenches. Craftsman seem like they are made well.

Find some old guy in a small town with a general weld shop. NJ or PA is full of them. This is an easy fix if you have ever done one before. You also have a beginning failure on another tapped hole that meeds attention. Antique cars and steam engines shops are a good source of leads to the proper repair shop.

Thanks OldNuc. The search will continue. Time to hit the yellow pages by me instead of the world wide web and talk to some of my friends who are into vintage cars. Eventually someone will turn up. I was looking at a few you tube videos last night and came across some interesting videos.

Here's one of the web sites.

http://muggyweld.com

Well I found a fellow aquarium hobbyist who is a welder and teaches welding at a trade school who suggested silver soldering so I'm going to take it to him next weekend (a bit out of the way but the guy knows what he's doing so looking foward to getting that part taken care of). Will have to leave the machine in tact as he wants to test to make sure there are no leaks. In the meantime I can order a whole new set of gaskets.

Wondering if it's easier to work on replacing all the wiring while everything is pretty much together or wait until I take everything apart.

I do have another option. The seller gave me the option of returning the machine for a full refund, chipping in $50 for boiler repair or sending him the boiler to have it repaired. So I'm kind of mulling that through.

From what you showed us I wouldn't replace the wiring, just redo the cooked connections.

Returning to the seller? It looks like your friend can handle the repair, and then you'll have a Maximatic. You can use the $50 to pay for seals.

Silver brazing is the best fix for this as brass brazing is too high of a heat for this part.

Update

Got the flange silver brazed locally by a welder for $40. Took him a few minutes. He cleaned out the flange with a metal file and then brazed it.

Here's the work but a quick question. Would you file down the excess metal on the right flange for aesthetic purposes ? You can still see where the crack was but it's filled in. Best of all I didn't have to re tap the threads.

What do you all think ?

Second pic

From where I sit, that's not silver braze but just regular old braze. I did a lot of brazing and silver soldering/brazing in my younger days and properly done, silver braze would have just filled the crack and left only a line with a slightly different color. To pull it off you'd probably have had to acid etch the crack to get the crack clean if that's even possible.

And using a vice or a needle nose pliers to crimp pins you expect to carry 6 or 10 amps of current is asking for trouble. It's not that expensive to get a passable crimper for open barrel connectors. Here are some links to crimpers that might work. Personally I'd watch ebay for the last one in the list. I've no idea why they think it's worth $55 but crimping tools for prototyping often seem overpriced. I have the last two in the list and the third one is a better designed tool but doesn't have the wire range of the fourth one, but the leverage on the fourth one is all wrong so sometimes it takes putting one handle on the ground and a bunch of weight on the other one to get a decent crimp.

http://www.digikey.com/catalog/en/partgroup/10140/22584
http://www.digikey.com/product-search/e ... =search_go
http://www.digikey.com/product-detail/e ... 3-ND/26402
http://www.digikey.com/product-detail/e ... -ND/243789

Also search ebay for "open barrel crimper"

Also, don't solder proper crimps, only solder if the best you can do is close the terminal and if you solder, make sure the wire is well supported and does not flex as the soldering will cause a stress riser in the wire where the solder stopped flowing up the wire.

I'm more than willing to do stupid things, but when you're dealing with high currents in a hot humid environment you need to do it right. Given the common occurrence of problems like this, it's clear that even the manufacturers don't always get it right. I tend to use 14ga wire when replacing wires on espresso machines, not so much because it needs the current capacity, but it's less likely to overheat and can stand more problems with the connection and it's what I keep around for these kinds of problems.

It's also possible that for particularly badly corroded connections or even to prevent future corrosion, that some of the products from Caig Laboratories might be useful, not cheap though.

Ira