For years I had a super-automatic Saeco and I was happy (ignorance is bliss). A few months back it finally bit the dust. Initially I busted out the Moka pot and suffered for a while. Thinking a slight upgrade would make me happy I bought a Brikka. That kept me happy for a little while but my eyes started wandering. I began lurking on Home-Barista and reading everything that I could find on beginner setups and common pitfalls in equipment selection. I quickly realized that my eyes were bigger than my wallet and that I was going to have to buy used/broken equipment and work on it to get the setup that I really wanted. The following is the beginning of my quest.

I found a La Cimbali MD6 on ebay that was "working" and offered the seller $200. He accepted and here it is:










It was incredibly hard to get the burr to crank down enough to get an espresso grind and everything was covered in coffee grease/gunk and grounds to I decided to take the burr out:







With all of the gunk on top of the sweeper (is that what that's called?) I decided it needed to come out too:







That revealed a whole lot of grossness too so I decided that the whole thing had to come apart. Unfortunately, the grinder comes apart from the bottom up so that's where I started:









The dispenser funnel/plate was really gross too:



The doser was gross so that had to come apart too:







Here it is all scrubbed down and clean:



Unfortunately, the rods that hold the body together were cross-threaded and did not come out intact:





Replacement parts are unavailable for this grinder so I ordered some M4 rod (and some rubber feet) from McMaster Carr that I'm going to cut down to size and thread (sigh). While I'm waiting I think I'm going to paint the body of the grinder. What color do you think I should paint it?

Nice work so far.

Hard to go wrong with a satin black.

+1!

Thanks for posting. Enjoy seeing teardowns.

Good thing you had a growler of beer to help things along.

'Twas dirty! I have a project grinder I need to work on too. Keep posting!

Thanks everyone! Satin black it is:

I wonder how that coffee shop is doing

Bikeminded wrote: Good thing you had a growler of beer to help things along.

+10

Bikeminded wrote:Good thing you had a growler of beer to help things along.

Unfortunately, the growler is empty but there is a nice bottle of bourbon off camera to the left.

Looking forward to seeing the finished result.

Have you sourced new burrs yet?