With all the talk about Kees van der Westen's plans to do a new series of the famous Speedster, I thought I could do something back for you all: visit Kees, take some pictures and write potentially a feature article.

As Dan wrote to me, Kees is a bit of an enigma in the espresso world - one of the first things he said to me was he did not want to be photographed "as it all was about his work and not himself". Enigmatic, I would say.

I really had a very good visit there and accidentally a German barista Fabian Schmidt was there as well, Fabian could not keep his eyes off the Speedster Mk II and repeatedly said "besser gibt's nicht" (German for "you can't get it any better").

Is it different from Mk I? Totally.
Homebrewn group. No La Marzocco - everything Kees van der Westen.

The proper Dutch pronunciation of Kees' name being almost like "case" in English, Fabian's wordplay "beauty case" was very appropriate.

I will do a serious write up, and with peer review help hope to have that turned into a Feature article with higher res pictures.

Regards
Peter

P.S. so, for now, some smaller pictures you can look at, if you promise to not drool too much.


PID in the background. The cups are a small set of test cups. The "real" design Kees envisions is totally different.


Freehand shots at available light in Kees' workshop. Luckily the camera has image stabilization. I had the x-wide converter on and at 4000x3000 noticed some glare. I will have to redo a number of pictures - Kees volente.

Notice the new group. I noted somewhere else one Speedster Mk I special version Kees did for his brother reminded me of the Bentley 1929 Speed Six era and type of design. Watch the pump handle.

Do you see the key hole next to the (right hand) hot water faucet? Thats not a key hole. It is a plunger valve that comes out - it implements progressive infusion and gives a visual clue about the process.


What would that old US TV character Bundy say, bootie time? Not sure what it meant as a non-native English speaker, but I guess it applies.

The plunger progressive pre-infusion - detail.


Fully pre-infused.


Pump switch - handle.

Personnel coffee corner at Kees van der Westen.
Mirage Idrocompresso with Veloce body and sharky sides.


Where have I read that before?

Absolutely gorgeous

Thank you so much for the pics.

Nice pictures! THANKS!

Does it also make coffee?

Now that you got everybody envious - where's the article???

(Fabian Schmidt - German SCAE Barista Champion in 2003 and Kees' distributor for Germany..)
http://www.la-potenza.com/

To make you more lusting and turn your faces even greener, a look at the inside.
The PID in the rear is for the steam boiler - for the remainder of what can be seen in this picture and outside it (in other pictures) you'll have to patiently wait for my write-up.
The temperature (centigrade) is still very low, yet the speed at which it was going up made me think you could almost switch the machine on and wait for it to be hot enough.

Regards
Peter

Green enough?

Did you get to try it? The pump pressure moves the piston?
How big is the machine? It's hard to tell the size from the pictures.
That looks like a normal LM pf? No Teflon coating?

Edit: Work of art - outside AND inside

If I keep responding to these posts, I will not finish my write-up.

I hope to touch on all these kind of things.

Regards
Peter

Thanks for sharing your photos! Nice job!

Things just keep getting better for the espresso consumer. If the 1-group Idro never materializes, I might wind up with one of these. It's funny how consumers are - while I recognize that the GS/3 is a great machine, I have little desire for one; but this Speedster, oh--oh.

I just wish I did not see the teflon tubing inside. The teflon in my Brewtus II near the steam boiler hardened and cracked, causing a leak. It's an easy fix, but the right teflon is not easy to get here in Canada, and I would just rather not have to deal with it in a top-notch machine.

Mark

Those electronics looks awfully close to the steam boiler. I wonder if that will pose a problem. Part of the electronics look like it's practically mounted to the steam boiler. At any rate, at Toshiba our engineering typically analyze our chips at 125C or 257F and that's because the processors are doing some intense video processing or high speed IO. It is entirely possible for PID controls to withstand quite a bit of heat considering they aren't doing a whole lot of processing anyways, so they probably don't generate much heat of their own. But if the steam boiler is at 277F like the GS3, then that probably is pushing right up against the limit of those PID controls.