Upgraditis has struck again and this time made me the proud owner of a used Faema MC80, a big conical monster. Giving her a good cleanout I found a fair amount of oil all over the place, the wiring, the bottom plate, the inside of the whole contraption in fact. At first I thought this was coffee residue but it smells weakly of motor oil instead of rancid coffee. I'm thinking that this may have come out of the apparent chamber directly beneath the grind chamber. The first picture shows some of the oil visible as brown gunk. The second picture shows what I think may be some kind of transmission chamber, right below the aluminum (lighter colour) grind chamber, with a hole indicated by the arrow. There is gray putty-like stuff around there.

Could the gray stuff be the same as the brown stuff? Did it come out of that hole? Is it supposed to do that, or the oil be all over the place / do I need to be worried??

Thanks!

Don't be worried. Oily residue everywhere is on mine too. I don't know why. The gearbox is filled with gray Moly disulphide grease.

Great, thanks Roeland (again, with this grinder ). I guess I'll let the gearbox unopened for now..

Mine was also very dirty and oily... I just clean a little and put the box.

Good to hear. You must be the person from the French website who put lots of pictures of your MC80 (I couldn't understand all of it unfortunately)

I am member of several french forum with the same name. If you need help / translations, don't hesitate.

Thanks! I do have one question actually. I wanted to get the lower burr off, but I'm not sure how to do that without damaging things. The hex nut on the top is nice, but what do I use to hold the shaft still? I'm hesitant to do it by simply blocking the sweeper vanes, because they are connected to the shaft by thin aluminum connections, and I know of people who have broken theirs off (by sticking in a brush before the shaft had stopped turning).

Screw the upper burr back on, put it on a very fine setting, add rice and turn the upper nut. The thread is counterclockwise, so you need to turn clockwise, the direction of grinding, to loosen it. By turning it in the direction of grinding, the burrs will start to grind the rice, the rice is probably hard enough to give sufficient countertorque.

genius!