Chinese ALM lever - Page 2

A haven dedicated to manual espresso machine aficionados.
renatoa
Posts: 769
Joined: 7 years ago

#11: Post by renatoa »

... or my kettle... stay within one degree for a minute after cut flame.

vit
Posts: 978
Joined: 9 years ago

#12: Post by vit »

truemagellen wrote:Just to clarify I was commenting on the design without PID from 2019 that required kettle water not the updated version with PID that Brian reviews.

Also I should have explained that the thermal conductivity of brass is far greater than stainless (like 10x or something while 2x for carbon steel) so it distributes the heat instead of insulating it (heat soaking it). Stainless basically act like an insulator since the heat stays on the surface (cylinder wall). This is not a bad thing look at the robot
As about thermal conductivity, if it's about the thermal loss, it's not only about material but also about conductivity between the surface and surrounding air, so difference between materials isn't that big

A while ago - before I bought Flair, I had a discussion with one member here about temperature stability of it vs. my home made "espresso machine" which is aluminum made moka pot equipped with valve and pump. And his opinion was that surely my device has much worse temperature stability as it is aluminum (with even higher conductivity than brass) vs. stainless steel with some insulation

In reality, my measurements revealed that with Flair I can't achieve brew temperature as high as with that aluminum device - even if I use inverted steam preheat for Flair which is considerably more effective than boiling preheat he was using on Flair ...

It's not that easy to predict the behavior of a machine ...

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truemagellen
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Joined: 14 years ago

#13: Post by truemagellen »

vit wrote: A while ago - before I bought Flair, I had a discussion with one member here about temperature stability of it vs. my home made "espresso machine" which is aluminum made moka pot equipped with valve and pump. And his opinion was that surely my device has much worse temperature stability as it is aluminum (with even higher conductivity than brass) vs. stainless steel with some insulation
i would really like to see this machine. Did you make a post about it?

vit
Posts: 978
Joined: 9 years ago

#14: Post by vit replying to truemagellen »

Yeah ... a few years ago I posted a photo of it. It looks ugly and is not very practical ... but it produces real espresso. Used it for about 2 years ...

renatoa
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#15: Post by renatoa »

Not sure if the same thing, but today you can build very easy such machine and even have pressure profiling !
Remove the safety valve of a mokka pot, and replace it with a bicycle tire valve, that's all !
Fill the bottom part with already boiled water, screw the upper part, then fit to the valve a Xiaomi portable battery powered compressor, capable up to 10 Bar, and start the brew.

vit
Posts: 978
Joined: 9 years ago

#16: Post by vit »

Yes, that's pretty much it

However, making espresso with 10 EUR device is connected with some challenges

- while my 1cup moka express clone sealed perfectly up to 11bar (max that I tested), original Bialetti 2cup moka express had problems with more than 3-4bar
- filter isn't designed for that pressure, so it buckled, which caused some amount of channeling through center of the puck similar way like in Flair classic baskets that are actually made concave (with Flair bottomless basket being worst); recently I replaced it with bottom of normal basket which significantly improved the result (in both Flair and this "machine")
- dosing and tamping of moka pot basket for espresso is somewhat complicated
- if ordinary moka pot is used, crema is significantly destroyed when the coffee is poured from it into the cup; I solved it turning the device upside down
- etc ...

This is however off topic, but maybe not so off topic is the fact that even making espresso with 500+ EUR devices is also a bit challenging - as we can see in this and some other threads ...

renatoa
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#17: Post by renatoa »

New chinese "guess what is boiling" machine :D

https://almkopi.com/2021/11/16/zxs-espresso-5s-自由萃取/

https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1Cb4y1f7WX/

https://almkopi.com/262-2/

They spawn models as prolific as virus versions :)

renatoa
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Joined: 7 years ago

#18: Post by renatoa »


Nunas
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#19: Post by Nunas »

Looks like a piece of lab equipment :)

renatoa
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#20: Post by renatoa »

like... Breaking bad coffee ? :D