Nice find, Lucio! Is Jim right, that the lever opens the flow of water but isn't used for compressing the flow to the coffee?

I have word from a collector who's not on the boards that it looks like an AMA Milano except for the lever, which he has never seen before on a machine like this. He thinks the lever might just be a decorative way of opening the valve, not an idrocompressore.

I can chime in here. This machine is much closer to a Robbiati Atomic than it is to the AMA Milano machines- though they all share a common form. This is sand cast alloy- just like the Atomic. The bolt on the base of the boiler is where the sand is removed after casting. And the lever is full idrocompresso- caffe con crema- not a simple valve to release the water through the coffee. It is an unusual ratcheted design manual lever. In practice it is quite similar to a Pavoni lever.

LVX is famous in the small world of domestic coffee machine collecting- at least as far as I am concerned.... Ciao Lucio!

sorrentinacoffee wrote:LVX is famous in the small world of domestic coffee machine collecting- at least as far as I am concerned.... Ciao Lucio!

And he's a really good guy who loves collecting. Check out our friend's equipment listing, "+ 300 coffee makers."

Later add: I also like reading his very interesting blog by clicking the web (round) icon in his profile. I use Google Chrome as my default browser, so it automatically translates the Italian into English for me. One of the latest stories there is Lucio's heroic restoration of a very scaled and corroded Gaggia Gilda, which was the very first home lever espresso machine. A nice feature is if you click on a picture, it opens in higher resolution in Picasa so you can inspect the photo up close.