La Pavoni piston thread-lock

[trillian]

I have a fairly new (bought new in August) La Pavoni Stradavari.

What is happening is that the piston is coming loose and slowly unscrewing itself and once it moves down a little bit it reaches the point where it cannot go up high enough to let in water properly when the lever is raised.

I had the machine serviced once and it looks like all the tech did was adjust the shaft using the screws at the top. So now after another couple months the piston has shifted again.

Rather than trapse across town again to the shop and then wait another week or so till it's fixed and then shlep back up there and back to collect it, I decided to open it up myself and have a look.

It's a brass piston and it just threads onto the shaft. There is some blue stuff around it that must be some kind of thread-lock but clearly isn't doing the job.

So the question now is, what do you do to keep the piston from coming loose?

Thanks,
trillian

[stefano65]

We use a Italian made NSF product called
LOK-EAL 18-10

[trillian]

Well, a quick google search on that turns up nothing.

(I'm in London England by the way)

[shadowfax]

Sheryl, are you sure your name's not "Tricia?"

I'm not sure if it's available in the UK, but I think you might look into Loctite 2046 Threadlocker. Looks like it's not even super-readily available in the US, so you might have to keep looking.

[trillian]

Well, I went ahead and just tightened the piston to as tight as I could gripping the piston by hand and I really don't see why it would work loose on its own. So for now I won't worry about threadlock and we'll see how it goes but the machine works perfectly again, which I suspected it would.