Paul, you are an artist (museum curator?) at restoring these vintage lever espresso machines. Always a pleasure to follow each one your threads.

My God I think I only understand now Paul ! When you said I "passed on" I understood that "I had my hands on". It was annoying for me that you think that
But my English is bad... it means that you think fboubert offered me but I refused, that's it ? He never did because he knows I don't like it to much. Even if I love what you are doing with it

Haha no I thought he offered it to you and you refused because we both know what happens to the machines that he has.

pootoogoo wrote:Just for the records. The guy appearing on the picture is believed to be Gabriel Siksik, founder of the brand.
The address and phone number is also the same as on Paul's machine (very first address).

I found that picture few years ago, as I was trying to write the history of the brand but I ended up having too few things to share. I contacted the Conti headquarter to get access to their archives but they, unfortunately, do not seem to care so much about old history.

<image>

Just to come back to that picture, our detective Vincent had an interesting comment about it: the license plate on the new Citroën van points to mid-1951 (because of the letters used before the Paris identification "75")... hence confirming the date from another angle.

Thanks a lot for your hard work. It is great to confirm that it has the original group and to see the history behind the brand.

A quick test today of the boiler plate gasket. I think Pascal has mentioned this before as well, but a very important and time saving step is to heat up the boiler before you add the panels etc..I like to heat up the boiler, when it is not closed and not under pressure. That allows you to get the metal parts hot for a while and then let it cool down. When it is cold you can retighten the boiler nuts and you would be surprised how loose they are after a few heating and cooling cycles. I always do this before a first pressure test.



Anyway the boiler did leak I had to remove the boiler plate a few times before I discovered a tiny nick on the boiler flange that was allowing water to creep out. Teflon gaskets are great, but the surface must be good.

Here is the group piston, the same system as the Gaggia but the size is smaller.



There is one upgrade from the gaggia piston, the one-way valve prevents the brew pressure going backwards. On the Gaggia you can only access this valve by removing the piston from the group and then unscrewing the piston components - which is always impossible. The Conti/Eterna group has a better system whereby the one-way valve can be removed from the face of the piston.



It's a really lovely bit of machining. Just imagine all those men and women machining these parts manually on mills and turret lathes - CNC free!



I also picked up the chrome this afternoon. Looks great, but I still have not finished the main body.

I already said my English is not too good

For the complicated case sometimes I warm the metal with a gas torch. When I can't warm water without assembling a body part that will make impossible to retighten bolts/nuts after.

I wonder if it is not frustrating to work so fast.
the blues of the finished work is coming soon.

Paul_Pratt wrote:It's a really lovely bit of machining. Just imagine all those men and women machining these parts manually on mills and turret lathes - CNC free!

This is what always impresses me with these vintage machines and why I feel it's so great that people like you are bringing them back to life. On that note, this is a lovely looking machine.

Not much done today. Still back and forth with my stainless steel casting company about the Robot parts...

There is one thing that really annoys me about the machine construction, the 2 lower valves for the sight glass on the left and the hot water on the right can only be installed or removed with the boiler out of the black frame, otherwise they hit the black frame. Today I needed to remove the hot water tap and so had to take the whole boiler out of the frame, which of course meant undoing all the boilers nuts, so I will have to do another heat and cool cycle tomorrow to make sure the boiler does not leak.

The drip tray looks amazing though!



Not sure if I shared this machine on HB, but I have another Victoria Arduino machine I restored a few years ago. Anyway we will have some guests from VA soon and so I unpacked my VA machine and was making coffee. It's called a Mini Vat.