Balthazar_B wrote:Beautiful VA restoration, Paul! Is that nickel on the textured back of the machine?

Yes I think it is nickel, it is the original all I did was clean it up. I think the metal panel pattern is called "tree bark".

Amazing work, gorgeous machine. Paul, you can start your own museum!

Paul_Pratt wrote: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.

The usual oohs and aahs ... very nice. Thank you for showing us another treasure.

crazy4espresso wrote:Amazing work, gorgeous machine. Paul, you can start your own museum!

That is the plan one day....

Lots of small jobs completed today. I cut a new teflon gaslet for the group neck. Here you can see a weird offset hole where the pick up tube goes.



I think that gasket will be a work in progress to see how the group performs. I wonder if it will be a bit on the cold side, the hole in the brass group casting to the piston chamber is only 5mm in diameter so not much contact with the boiler water to heat the group mass.

The bracket that holds the gas burner under the boiler broke yesterday, so I had to make a new one and powder coat that. Whilst I was doing that I decided to make a bracket for a pressure switch. I found a spare tapped hole on the boiler plate and dug out an old mercury pressure switch from a Faema.



A bit later...



Some parts were powder coated as they were quite corroded. But it's all back together now.



The bracket for the pressure switch is attached to the boiler plate and I put in a longer stud than necessary as I will connect an earth wire to that later. Also last week I added a 1/4 BSP hole to the boiler plate, the only modification to the machine I have done. I wanted a place for a fitting so that I can connect it to the pressure switch. Originally they used a fitting on the back of the lower sight glass fitting - that went to the gas burner. But that fitting is tiny, an M10 thread and I was worried the hole would block easily with scale. So that is why I added a larger hole up in the steam dedicated for the pressure switch. In the photo above, of the pressure switch you can see the lower sight glass fitting - I capped that off with a custom made brass end nut.



A few days ago I also swapped the M10 hex bolts holding the boiler plate to the boiler, in favour of studs and brass nuts. I do not like using bolts in blind holes as you must get an exact length of bolt, too long and you can't tighten the boiler plate. Too short and you may not have all the threads you could have got. So I like studs as you are always certain you have used as many threads as you can, and the brass nuts are great for preventing galling on the stainless studs.

Last job was sorting out the steam and water wands, they were missing their end nuts and nipples for securing them to the steam valve bodies. They were missing because they were originally made of iron and had rusted away, I had to cut them off. As a result of the rust, the fittings were damaged so I had to drill them out and braze in new custom made fittings that the steam wand will mount onto.



What is unusual about this Conti is that all the fittings use metric threads, not the usual BSP threads. So rather than a 1/8 BSP fitting they used an M10 x 1.0 fitting, similar but not compatible really. The water inlet tap, for example used an M14 x 1.0 thread, rather than 1/4 BSP or even 3/8 bsp. Anyway it was all good news for me as my lathe cuts metric threads and I was able to make all new metric fittings. For example the water inlet fitting was M20 x 1.5 male to M14 x 1.0 male so I made M20 x 1.5 Male to 3/8 BSP for the water inlet hose.

I'm still drooling here. I love seeing someone who can basically fabricate anything that's broken or missing and make it better than original.

Paul_Pratt wrote:
What is unusual about this Conti is that all the fittings use metric threads, not the usual BSP threads. So rather than a 1/8 BSP fitting they used an M10 x 1.0 fitting, similar but not compatible really. The water inlet tap, for example used an M14 x 1.0 thread, rather than 1/4 BSP or even 3/8 bsp. Anyway it was all good news for me as my lathe cuts metric threads and I was able to make all new metric fittings. For example the water inlet fitting was M20 x 1.5 male to M14 x 1.0 male so I made M20 x 1.5 Male to 3/8 BSP for the water inlet hose.

Paul, I had similar issue with the metric fitting on my Princess. I almost cross threaded couple fitting since I did not think they were using metric fitting.
I found out that a French company Legris (now part of Parker) makes those metric fitting. I can get those fitting in the states if you need them and I think even Amazon sells some.

https://www.legris.com/Legris_ecom/Rech ... ngue=en_US

My custom piston seals came in today, but before that I had to machine up some brass rings to work to spread out the piston seals and cut some paper spacers. The spacers I cut from 2mm Klinger gasket sheets. Anyway here is the gasket stack for this Conti, identical to a Gaggia stack, but the OD and ID are different. The spacers will help me try and make sure the stack lines up in the correct position.



The gasket stack and brass rings all drop down snuggly into the group from the top. Then there is a threaded collae that screws into the top of the group. When this is tightened down it compresses the stack and pushes the seal flares to seal on the piston. As you can see the threaded collar has has a very hard life.



My custom piston ring dimensions are pretty good, if not a little too good. I was unable to get the piston down through the gasket stack and ended up having to make an installation tool from an old tamper. This tool helps open the inner diameter of the seals so that the piston that follows it can slip through. It did work, but it was a pain.



Once the piston is in place the spring is then installed. The spring is held in place with a 2nd threaded collar that threads into the 1st collar. The spring has seen better days and I will probably end up having some made.



Anyway it all went together in the end, it was a struggle. As you can see after I put the top section of the group on, I then had to tighten the collars up.



I then I ran out of time for the day! But the boiler did come up to pressure...until tomorrow.

Paul, that steam knob has a beautiful shape. I notice it's completely different than the knob for the hot water tap. Do you think it's original? Gorgeous either way.

Great work.

Do you ever plan to re-machine less than perfect aesthetic looking parts ?