Hello you good folks. I seem to have a dead lamp on my Caravel 1. Does anyone have solid advice on how to go about and replace the darned thing? Help will be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance!

My Arrarex plug fried today in it's plug adaptor into a 200/110 step-up transformer. The hot prong on the Caravel plug melted as did the adaptor. The fit was a little loose. I need to cut off the plug and wire the cord into a US plug. The Caravel has the 3 prong horizontal plug with an outside wire just hanging there. I assume this is a ground wire.

Can someone instruct me on how to do this?

Thanks,
Laurence

This just arrived from Milan:



It's in great condition overall. It's one of the very first series VAMs with the double row of holes in the boiler, and no hole on the bottom of the piston. It has a curiously mismatched lever handle and PF handle - black on the lever and white on the PF. Both are definitely original VAM pieces, though, as the PF has the telltale black 'button' on the end of the handle and the lever has the flat arms and larger nubs to fit into the piston. Seems weird that one or the other got lost but was replaced with something from the same - relatively short - production era.

I've still got the original seals in and am waiting to see how they perform over the next week or so before I swap in new ones. The lack of hole in the bottom of the piston definitely makes pulling shots slightly different than on my Caravel 1.0.

That is a real beauty Greg, thanks for the photo. If it weren't 22:30 here I'd pull out my VAM and have toast with you. As it is, tomorrow is a work at home day so I think I'll fire it up and try some of that light roast coffee I've had trouble with on the Lusso.

grog wrote:The lack of hole in the bottom of the piston definitely makes pulling shots slightly different than on my Caravel 1.0.

This looks exactly like the model I have -- two rows of holes in the boiler, no hole in the piston. I've been working hard to avoid coffee-back-to-the-boiler, and my best success has been to be _very_ fast when I come up and down for a second pull to avoid lingering and letting the coffee backwash.

Beautiful find -- the paint looks to be in better shape than mine. For the handles - maybe they were replaced while keeping the actual metal?

Does the flattened heating element have a date stamp? (I always think it's cool to see a 50s date stamp on an element that still works well!)

Enjoy!

Here's my rewiring of the machine when I changed to the Cafelat heater.

Here's the original:


Next's rewired using a power cable with a modern 3-prong US plug. If it's not clear the green wire from the power cable goes to the case. I also used some close-loop terminal lugs so the wires don't get loose inside the case.


Here's entire bottom with new 600V rated Teflon insulated wires:

The originals seals are performing quite well - I'm impressed. It's weird using the 'no-hole' piston after using a Caravel 1.0 for the past few years - the sponginess people mention is immediately apparent. The shots are amazing, though - completely syrupy and dense, perhaps even more so than what I get on my Caravel. They are super-ristretto, perhaps half the volume of what one can obtain with the piston with the hole.

Will, the element is stamped 59/11, so I guess November of 1959.

grog wrote:The originals seals are performing quite well - I'm impressed. It's weird using the 'no-hole' piston after using a Caravel 1.0 for the past few years - the sponginess people mention is immediately apparent. The shots are amazing, though - completely syrupy and dense, perhaps even more so than what I get on my Caravel. They are super-ristretto, perhaps half the volume of what one can obtain with the piston with the hole.

If you're willing to play the backwash roulette game, you can get a larger shot. The good thing I've noticed is that I can definitely push _hard_ without fear of breaking an o-ring on these pistons.

grog wrote:Will, the element is stamped 59/11, so I guess November of 1959.

Awesome! Mine has "59/9 CALROD". I'd been guessing September of 1959, but I hadn't seen anyone else confirm a similar stamp in this thread before (unless I missed it).

Nice! My routine for pulling the shot is virtually identical to this on my Caravel 1.0. Still working on dialing in the VAM routine.