+1 to what Dave said.

That is quite dirty tear it down as far as you can and descale. You most likely will need to get some of those rubber seals on order if you pull them out.

-Cecil

Some good news... I have received the citric acid. Still waiting on the flare wrenches. What kind of concentration of citric acid do I want to use?

Here is a good link that touches on your question

Citric acid concentration for descaling

Chris,

I'm also working on a Cimbali M30 Dosatron. I'm sure most of the innards are similar so if you find anything peculiar while reassembling let me know. I'll do the same.

Mike

cyclones wrote:Some good news... I have received the citric acid. Still waiting on the flare wrenches. What kind of concentration of citric acid do I want to use?

You should be able to get flair wrenches at any hardware store, got mine at Sears. They are also refered to as tube or tubing wrenches. The head goes around the fitting more than a box wrench. That distributes the torque around the nut and helps to prevent twisting or bending the tube.

Citric acid, works best when hot. When you mix it up, do it with boiling water and put your parts in. It will be much more aggressive. Keep your head back, you dont want a face full of citric acid steam.

You should be able to get flair wrenches at any hardware store, got mine at Sears.
Citric acid, works best when hot. When you mix it up, do it with boiling water and put your parts in. It will be much more aggressive. Keep your head back, you dont want a face full of citric acid steam.

Just to clarify, I know about flare wrenches; I used them before, I just don't own any. I have some on order that are supposed to be delivered by fedex on Tuesday. I surprisingly didn't find any at a couple of the local stores I tried, and I wanted to get a good U.S.-made set. One time I purchased a small socket set in a pinch that was made in China. Not good quality. So I got an SK tools brand. They're made in Chicago. Got them through an online tools store for about $58 -- didn't want to pay suggested retail price. Here they are at MFR's website. Look very nice!
http://www.skhandtool.com/Default.aspx?fusemode=10&pid=376

OK; will use very hot water.

movnmik wrote:Chris,

I'm also working on a Cimbali M30 Dosatron. I'm sure most of the innards are similar so if you find anything peculiar while reassembling let me know. I'll do the same.

Mike

Sounds good, Mike. Just so you know, mine is an M31. I don't expect there to be substantial differences, but there probably are some minor ones between the two models. It's good to know I'm not in this alone and inexperienced. Just inexperienced!

I got a little farther with my tear-down tonight. I'm really hoping to see that nice wrench set on Tuesday. Tomorrow I need to come up with a system to better organize my tear-down. I've taken a lot of pictures, but when I get further into the tear down and have more parts, I'm going to need a good system to help me to more easily figure out what goes where when I put it back together. I'm thinking of using some sort of containers to organize sections of tear-down together. I'm a bit worried about getting the right tubes in the right place when reassembling...

Anyway, I drained the boiler and then removed the heating element. The element looks ok; just scaled. But I doubt it will need replacement. The inside of the boiler has tons of build-up. I think it will take multiple descaling soaks.



The guy who sold it to me said it would not heat. Heating element looks ok; anything else I should look at while its apart that might cause it not to heat?

To make sure on the elements you need to put a DVM set to the lowest ohm range through them. You ought to read about 5-13 ohms through each terminal. Then you need to read body to terminal, if you read 0 at any point then you have failed. Body to terminal should be infinite. Once you pass both of these then you need to go get the correct gasket to seal the heater.

Good luck and test well.

-C

I tested the heating element. The resistance is about 20 on both coils. Resistance to ground is infinite. This is a 120V machine.

I'm descaling the boiler right now.