After:

The piston gaskets were still soft and easy to remove. I think this machine was just locked in a closet because the user didn't have a good grinder and got frustrated..... I mean think of the grinders available to home baristas 36 years ago? It must have been hard. still..... I would have tried, if they had let me drink coffee when I was 11.

Picture of what it looks like when you spend four or five days traveling across CA on your head.

Hi Clay,

No picture. Could you post again? Did you celebrate popping the cork on the Cremina with some champagne (or beer)?

Inside of boiler looking for damage..... no visible cracks, but that doesn't mean its not..... only pressure will tell...

Really? I am seeing the pictures... I will check again... I think I got it. And yes I had a beer in celebration, but only after I got the site glass out unscathed, then I went online and ordered my gasket kit and various other bolts and washers....that already shipped today! yeah!! Last picture for tonight, is of the shower screen, and why to not dig around with your screw driver on the inside of the group gasket. I didn't do this damage I swear... The screen still "snaps" onto the grouphead, so I think it will be fine with a new group gasket...

Boiler Element, not a great picture. I hope it will fire up! I have to clean it up, and re-seal the connects with the kit. It is showing 12.4 ohms.....so I will keep my fingers crossed.

Bottom of boiler element plate

claypriley wrote:Picture of what it looks like when you spend four or five days traveling across CA on your head.<image>

It looks like it suffered quite a lot of force to dimple the boiler on the top that way. I wonder if the seller can refund some of your money because the machine was so very poorly packed? Might be worth taking up with eBay/PayPal. Did you take pictures of the machine in its box and notify the shipping company of the damage? Were there pictures of the boiler in the eBay ad?

claypriley wrote:Bottom of boiler element plate<image>

Scorch marks?

Hey Clay....at least you are still having fun! The little fur ball is Shorty, he was a feral Pomeranian that moved in a couple of hard winters ago from seemingly nowhere. I saw him out in the snow every few days for about 3 weeks and thought I was having flashbacks or something until finally Barb saw him and he became real.

The air compressor trick is a pretty good one, eh?

Looking at that boiler presents kind of a puzzler as the dent seems awfully symmetric to be random damage...looks like the full donut around the fill neck and I would expect to see asymmetrical denting and even the boiler fill neck crooked but it looks straight, or generally at a right angle to the top plane of the boiler. I have seen some different damage like this but it usually cocked the fill pipe one way or the other. If it indeed pushed down then you would expect to see the entire neck too low and the boiler cap possibly run out of threads before it seals. I can't come up with a good reason why they would have knocked it down at the factory. If the asbestos was tight on the dome and thicker around the fill pipe, giving the appearance of a nice even dome I would guess that this is a factory blem that was covered up with the coating....a shipping push in would have likely broken the asbestos on the top as well and it would have been flaking all over. It would have also likely flaked the chrome plating on the underside.

Part of the beauty of the asbestos was that they could just do whatever ugly manufacture on the boiler and then cover it up with the spray on.

I am wagering that this boiler has always been just as you see it and it is not a blow to the head....such an event would have likely also cracked the boiler knob at a minimum or even bent the top cover.