Nice clean

You have a non removalble heating element. You would have to buy a complete top boiler section if you wanted to upgrade the element.

I did not use any grease on gaskets or orings

Steam valve was hard to open indeed.

As for remaining scale its your call, probably stone at this point With larger chunks its allways an issue with larger piece breaking off and blocking the flow. Keep descaling regularly and you should be ok. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuyNA_yPwH0

Reassembly is going fine. Except after rewiring everything, I noticed a small grey o-ring that was hiding in the drip tray.

I couldn't remember where it comes from so I disassembled the steam wand to check if it wasn't this one but it seems not as the steam wand o-ring is now torn.

Does anyone know where the grey o-ring fits ? Pretty sure it's in a pipe somewhere but I cannot find it despite all the pictures I took during disassembly.

Would someone know a place where I can order (in europe) the steam wand o-ring (possibly all the steam wand internal) so that I can rebuild it ?

Fast forward a few days, I ended up ordering a newer style steam valve assembly. I put everything back together, however, the steam know if slightly off axis, which makes it really hard to turn. If I remove the little black guide around the knob, it wiggles big time but at least it's easy to turn as it is supposed to be.

Does anyone know of any trick or method to ensure the steam valve is aligned with the opening ?

jdel wrote: When I opened the boiler, I quickly realised that it wasn't drained properly despite me following instructions by purging both the steam and the group head. Is there a specific trick with v2 silvias ?

Just for the next person reading this, following your steps:
Remove the braided hose from the pump's elbow connection. Very little will drip out because the boiler is sealed (steam valve is closed).
Aim the free end of the braided hose up and pull it through the hole so that the end is up at boiler height... Now nothing will drip when air is allowed in to the boiler because the hose is up at the water-line.

Next, remove the copper tubing between boiler and steam-valve. Now you can turn the whole machine upside down over a sink or in the yard, air will flow into the braided hose and the water will flow out of the boiler.

Thanks for the idea, that's a smart way of doing it.

More progress (or not?) after the steam valve assembly arrived yesterday. So I mounted it and decided to test the machine, but the big idiot I am mixed my pictures and others found on the internet where the cables numbering is different, and well, you know what happened. Triggered circuit breaker, blown fuse and all that.

Fast forward, I relocated to another room, rewired correctly and turned it on. But this time, the pump doesn't pump anymore. When disassembling it, it seems like I lost the little teflon ball. I could swear I have never seen it while disassembling, but heh, so another week delay as a new pump is on the way. I will mount the new pump and use the old one for spare parts as everything worked fine before I disassemble it.

jdel wrote: Does anyone know of any trick or method to ensure the steam valve is aligned with the opening ?

With the plastic knob off and the top of the machine open you can put a big adjustable wrench on the valve body and pry it a little to make it point more to the center of the hole... This is bending the machine frame where the valve passes through back toward center, of course, not actually bending the valve.

Pump has arrived, and with it a new problem. I used the little ball and seal from the new pump and fixed my old pump in order to avoid removing the metal fitting from the high pressure side from the pump.

I did spend some time adjusting the opv properly and noticed that I have a leak around the braided flexible pipe coming out of the pump. The little coper washer is sitting inside correctly although it seems like it has been squashed a little bit.

I tried mitigating that with teflon, which kinda seem to work but it's stil very slightly leaking from the threading side and from just above as shown in the picture. Any recommendation on what I could have done wrong ?

We have finally reached the end of this thread. With time, patience and some brute force, I managed to get rid of the leaks by using a little more teflon and a lot more tightening than I originally thought was necessary on the high pressure side of the pump. Before I close it up, I decided to tinker a safe exit path for the water in case of leakage around the pump area. Not pretty but it will do the job.

Miss silvia is now operational, heating up correctly and pulling half decent shots. Now it's my job to learn how to get better shots each time.

Thanks everyone who contributed. I will update the first post with a compilation of comments, remarks, advice and parts list with providers. Hopefully future readers will find this useful.