Hi All,
You have been so helpful in the past!! I'm having a new problem with my machine - yesterday i pulled two of the most beautiful, tasty shots (only about an ounce each - trying not to overextract, so i was excited this morning to make my morning shot, i added fresh water (to my 1970ish europiccola) and turned it on massimo, and it never made the valve sing - i waited about 20 minutes, then i gave up and turned it to the lower setting and pulled my shot - it took a while to build pressure lifting and dropping the valve - but when i pulled the shot it was burned - the water was definitely too hot! i thought maybe there was too much water in the machine, so i drained some through the PF to clean it, and lowered the water to about 1/3 in the glass, then the same thing happened - i waited and waited for the valve to sing - it never really did, though enough pressure built to put a little steam in my cup.. when i pulled the espresso, the pressure was high at the PF and again came out very burned!!

Please help with your wonderful advise.

Thank you!
Sean

When it's cool, look inside the boiler for signs of scale. My initial guess is that you have scale which can be easily rectified with a de-scaling.

You can find threads on here of how to de-scale or can go over to YouTube to see videos. It's very simple to do.

Hope this helps.

If the valve did not sing as you say, it was not building pressure, simply boiling in the boiler and getting hotter and hotter. Could be you valve ball is held open with some scale of gunk, or you spring is very weak. The valve controls the pressure on the machine so without proper function the pressure will not build and the machine will just boil and get hotter and hotter as you describe.

orphanespresso wrote:The valve controls the pressure on the machine so without proper function the pressure will not build and the machine will just boil and get hotter and hotter as you describe.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but...

It's true that pressure will not build, but the machine will not get "hotter and hotter" unless all the water boils away. The boiler will remain at ~212F until it's empty. Once empty, the air trapped in the boiler will get hotter and hotter until either the heating element melts, or the over-temperature switch trips.

I descaled the machine a couple of times and that seems to have helped - but now it is taking forever to heat up. I think maybe my heating element is failing (it is 40 years old after all) i looked at the wire connections on the bottom, and they look well attached, so I'm not really sure where to go from here, the machine is old - no on off switch, just a metal toggle from massimo to minimo - so i'm not sure if i can find a new heating element somewhere, or how i would replace it...
sean

You could measure the resistance of the element with a multimeter or the wattage if you have a kill-a-watt.

Considering the machine is that old I wonder if it's 220V (there are some meters like kill-a-watt on ebay.com from China for 220V).

A nice fellow from Italy could have the element, you should ask him - he speaks English. Last time I've seen one around it was expensive...

Márcio.